Gillian Roberts. Prizing Literature: The Celebration and Circulation of National Culture

Gillian Roberts. Prizing Literature: The Celebration and Circulation of National Culture. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011. 261 pp. Bibliography. Index. $45.00 hc. In Prizing Literature, Gillian Roberts argues that awards for prose fiction are partly intended to naturalize immigrant writers and their works. She also demonstrates how these writers resist their adopted national culture in Canada. Interpreting their fiction, Roberts discovers that they are concerned with same questions of hospitality and citizenship that prizes themselves raise. She has written an instructive book for academics in literary and cultural studies. Prizing Literature has six chapters, beginning with an overview of three Canadian literary awards and three extranational awards: Governor General's Award for English-language fiction, Giller Prize, CBC's Canada Reads, and then Booker, Pulitzer, and Commonwealth Writers' Prizes. Her overview shows that these prizes are significant to aesthetics, culture, and economy, often simultaneously, as when promoters of lucrative Giller Prize are shown to be disingenuous (29) in presuming to judge, without political bias, excellence of writing. The following four chapters each focus on a different author: Michael Ondaatje, Carol Shields, Rohinton Mistry, and Yann Martel, each chapter a sequence of literary and cultural analyses integrated with basic biographical information. The conclusion turns for several pages to issue of how native writers such as Lee Maracle and Thomas King respond to claims of national belonging asserted in Canadian literary culture. This latter subject deserves a book-length study of its own, and Roberts is well-equipped to do it, or has led way for others. The main point of book is not surprising, but it is timely, nuanced, and well-supported by a variety of critical methods. Roberts argues that prose fiction of Ondaatje, Shields, Mistry, and Martel examines the distinction between citizenship and nationality, exposing degrees of belonging and unbelonging, and complication of national claims as perpetuated by host cultures (10). Although all these writers have accepted literary awards that promote Canadian nationalism to some extent, their stories also describe inconsistencies and more serious flaws, such as xenophobia and racism, in hospitality in this country. The extensive analysis of book reviews in Prizing Literature demonstrates that degree of hospitality around Canadian literature is encouraging but not without territoriality. Despite these issues, and partly because of prizes they have won, Ondaatje, Shields, Mistry, and Martel all seem to appreciate Canada as a country in which to write; Mistry has been especially critical of Canadian inhospitality in his book, Family Matters, and yet he also says that he is at ease (qtd. …

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