Beggining with an examination of how early settlers represented the territory of the Maritime provinces, this seminar will explore four key periods of literary ferment in the east. We will begin with Halliburton's social satires of the 1830's move to the Fredericton School of Confederation poets in the 1890's, and then examine the key texts of modernist renewal from 1940 onwards. Finally, we will study representative voices from the Acadian renaissance of 1970s. Our study will touch on the concerns central to Maritime writers from the 16th century to the present: the constraints of religious orthodoxy , the twin forces of isolation identity, the liberal versus conservative tensions of an emergent continentalism and a dominant imperial tradition, and the social phenomena of outmigration, class and resource-dependent labour. We will also consider questions of "nation" and "region" as they relate to issues of language, translation, ethnicity, and global shift.
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