Nation, Ethnicity, and Canada in Laura Goodman Salverson’s The Viking Heart

Bibliographic Data

ID20461097
AuthorsCarl Watts (0000-0002-7435-0666, Queen's University, corresponding author)
Year2016
Volume46
Issue1
Pages107-121
Publication date2016-01-02
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueThe American Review of Canadian Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0272-2011 • E-ISSN: 1943-9954
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/02722011.2016.1154881
OpenAlexW2347118201
LanguageEN
References cited19

This article argues that expressions of national identity in twentieth-century Euro-Canadian literature often conceive of the nation as existing in both ethnic and ostensibly pluralist, immigration-based models, and that the former is frequently valorized over the latter, resulting in the implicit legitimation of settler colonialism. It does so by examining a few major theorizations of nationalism—constructivism, ethno-symbolism, and ethnonationalism—and suggesting that literary critics' frequent adherence to the constructivism of Benedict Anderson can sometimes obscure the aforementioned dynamic. Finally, this article reads Laura Goodman Salverson's The Viking Heart (1923) as a text that renders in all its contradiction the problem of ethnicity and nation in Canada, arguing that Salverson combines (but does not synthesize) the twin forces of ethnicity and liberal pluralism that make up the Euro-Canadian imagination's split conception of the nation

Contradiction · Epistemology · Ethnic group · International relations · Legitimation · National identity · Nationalism · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Anthropology · Canadian Identity and History · Gender Studies · Law · Philosophy · Short Stories in Global Literature · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies

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