Medievalism in English Canadian Literature: From Richardson to Atwood ed. by M.J. Toswell and Anna Czarnowus

Reviewed by: Medievalism in English Canadian Literature: From Richardson to Atwood ed. by M.J. Toswell and Anna Czarnowus Raymond H. Thompson m.j. toswell and anna czarnowus, eds., Medievalism in English Canadian Literature: From Richardson to Atwood. Medievalism 17. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2020. Pp. vi, 212. ISBN: 978-1-84384-547-8. $99. The editors of this anthology begin by defining medievalism as 'the reception and recreation of the Middle Ages' (p. 2), and go on to explain that their focus here is upon 'how a particular nation or a particular ethnicity engages with medievalism' (p. 3). Canada's case is particularly complex since it not only has deep-seated roots in Britain for English Canada and in France for French Canada, but 'is deeply imbricated with American medievalism … in a multitude of genres and modes' (p. 4). They discern two major strains in Canadian medievalism: 'notional' (p. 9) and 'direct' (p. 10), the former imbued with an emotional attachment to perceived, but not always accurate, medieval traditions, the latter inspired by scholarly research into the field of medieval studies. They then briefly introduce the twelve essays by Canadian and Polish academics. As one might expect, they draw heavily upon current critical theory in their approach, especially reader-response and postcolonial. And as the use of 'imbricated' signals, they do favor specialized terminology. Few of the works discussed will be familiar to scholars outside the field of Canadian Literature. They start in the nineteenth century, when D.M.R. Bentley discerns a Christian socialist gospel of 'brotherhood' in 'Men of the North: Archibald Lampman's Use of Incidents in the Lives of Medieval Poets and Aristocrats' by this Canadian poet. Agnieszka Kliś-Brodowska examines two early Canadian novels, Julia Beckwith Hart's St. Ursula's Convent and John Richardson's Wacousta, for elements of Gothicism, which is 'rooted in a fascination with the medieval' (p. 36). Czarnowus deconstructs Wacousta as both a Gothic and a colonial romance. Brian Johnson argues that William Wilfred Campbell's play Mordred must also be read as 'a covert but disavowed Gothic fantasy of (post)colonial revenge against a psychically and geographically distant imperial parent' (p. 70). In 'Orientalist Medievalism in Early Canadian Periodicals' Laurel Ryan notes the ambivalent attitude towards the 'imaginary Middle Eastern [End Page 115] worlds' in which 'fantastically dreadful images' of the modern Ottoman Empire are contrasted with 'an impossibly lofty idea of a medieval Orient' (p. 86). When they move into the twentieth century, the essays deal with better-known writers. David Watts offers a postcolonial assessment of Robertson Davies' novel The Rebel Angels, which he categorizes as an example of the Collegiate Gothic, 'implicitly preoccupied with anxieties concerning the legitimacy of institutions on treaty land' (p. 110). Toswell proposes that Earle Birney 'engages in a conscious and self-conscious effort to make himself a public poet for Canada, using Chaucer's role as the father of English poetry as a model for his endeavour' (p. 116). Dominika Ruszkiewicz applauds Margaret Atwood's knowledge of her medieval source material and notes the value of her feminist perspective with its focus 'on details, on the real rather than ideal, on life as it is truly lived' (p. 141) in The Edible Woman and The Robber Bride; she goes on to illustrate these features with a close reading of Atwood's treatment of the story of Troilus and Cressida in the latter novel. Cory James Rushton's analysis of Kit Pearson's young adult novel A Perfect, Gentle Knight warns of the psychological dangers that result from the young protagonist's attempt to deal with the grief over his mother's death by retreating into a roleplaying game, casting himself as Lancelot and his siblings as other knights of the Round Table. Maintaining that readers of fantasy remain, 'directly or indirectly, the inheritors of medieval romance' (p. 159), Sylvia Borowska-Szerszun argues that 'Just as medieval authors selected various elements of earlier narratives to produce works that in certain ways resembled their original sources but also offered new qualities,' so in their fantasy fiction Guy Gavriel Kay and Charles de Lint 'approached the cultural memory to select, transform and reinterpret...

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