Dr. Candida Rifkind, Assistant Professor in English, will be speaking about Marvelous Mounties and Dashing Detectives: Pursuing Canadian Popular Literature and Culture in the 1920s and 30s at the next Brown Bag Research Lecture.
March 19, 2007
12:30 p.m. – 1:00 p.m.
Room 3C01 (3rd Floor Centennial Hall, Room 01)
The Brown Bag Lecture Series is sponsored by the Office of the Vice-President (Research & Graduate Studies). The event is open to the general public and everyone is welcome to bring their lunch.
The Research
How did Canadian writers and readers respond to the booms and busts of the 1920s and 30s in the fiction marketplace? What can the popularity of masculine fictional heroes, from gentlemanly Mounties to shady detectives, tell us about the effort to construct a distinct national identity at home and internationally? Why do readers return to the same characters and plot formulas many times over and what are the pleasures and politics of popular serial fictions? These are some of the questions behind this major study of popular and pulp fiction produced by English-Canadian writers in the modern era.
This research talk will focus on two of these writers, their publications, and the fascinating process of rediscovering their works and lives: Laurie York Erskine’s Renfrew of the Mounted series (written by an American enthralled with northern Canada)and Frank L. Packard’s Jimmie Dale detective series (written by a Canadian captivated by New York. Erskine’s Mountie fictions are an example of the American exoticization of Canada as a rugged yet law-abiding northern wilderness.
Studying popular serial fictions challenges the conventional literary history of this period and highlights the transitional status of both the spatial category of “Canadian” and the aesthetic category of “literature” in the early twentieth century.
