Wilderness, the West and the national imaginary in Guy Vanderhaeghe's The Englishman's Boy

Guy Vanderhaeghe scrutinises the garrison image in the wider context of the North American West in The Englishman's Boy. His appropriation of the conventions of the Western lays bare the underpinning ideologies of the genre, especially imperialist assumptions about wilderness and the role that genre and wilderness play in American and Canadian national mythologies. His configuration of the North American West rejects the traditional idea of space as a static background for historical events. This article investigates how Vanderhaeghe rewrites the past of the North American West in spatial terms to expose the interconnection among colonialism, the Western and the national imaginary, and how such remapping presents the Western landscape as a space palimpsestically inscribed by diverse social discourses

American west · Appropriation · Archaeology · Colonialism · Context (archaeology · Ethnology · Frontier · Homeland · Ideology · Inscribed figure · Mythology · Political science · Politics · Sociology · The Imaginary · Wilderness · American and British Literature Analysis · American Literature and Culture · Classics · History · Law · Poetry Analysis and Criticism · Ecology

• The reworkings of the Western from the northern side of the Medicine Line

  Vanja Polić•British Journal of Canadian Studies•2015

  Add to list

• Narrative Geography in Guy Vanderhaeghe's The Englishman's Boy

  Patricia Linton•The American Review of Canadian…•2001

  Add to list

• History and Fiction

  Open Access•Guy Vanderhaeghe•Journal of History•2005

  Add to list