Anxious Allegiances: Legitimizing Identity in the Early Canadian Long Poem

Relying upon deconstruction, discourse analysis, and close examination of contemporary historical events, Mazoff identifies and explores the periodic "ruptures" in the texts - inconsistencies, contradictions, anomalies, and deflections - that underscore the tension between the "unsaid" (the real historical, economic, and social conditions) and the surface level of the narrative (the aesthetic and genre constraints). His analysis reveals the extent to which problems of allegiance, anxiety, and identity were inextricably involved in the colonial and national projects, an involvement which the poetry, despite its intentions, could neither mask nor resolve. Offering insight on canonical Canadian long poems from Thomas Cary's Abram's Plains to Isabella Valancy Crawford's Hugh and Ion as well as the works of many lesser-known writers, Anxious Allegiances will be of great interest to literary scholars as well as historians, political scientists, and communication theorists studying the political and economic discourses at work in imperial-colonial relations.