Morgan, Cecilia

English

Histoire sociale / Social History (E-Journal, York University)

246 Histoire sociale / Social Historyinvestigates were in sync with their time, embracing structures of capitalism to exploit “tropes of rebellion and transcendence to competitively position themselves and their products within it” (p. 163). Showing us how to read prints as both historical artifacts and cultural representations, Lerner has written a captivating and richly researched history of the decades of radical transformation of media culture that will be of great use to scholars of visual culture, art history, social history, and French cultural studies. Susan HinerVassar CollegelittlE, J. L. – Fashioning the Canadian Landscape: Essays on Travel Writing, Tourism, and National Identity in the Pre-Automobile Era. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018. Pp. 327. It was all about the landscape, it seems, when nineteenth-century travellers and tourists looked out their railway carriage windows or (more likely) from the deck of a steamer and recorded their impressions of Cape Breton, Quebec’s Eastern Townships, the Labrador coast, or the lakes, mountains, and shorelines of British Columbia. In Fashioning the Canadian Landscape, historian J. I. Little has brought together eight previously published essays with two new contributions, along with an introduction and afterword, all of which foreground the role conceptions of landscape played in male travellers’ and tourists’ impressions of the Dominion. Little argues that notions of the picturesque inflected the accounts left by Canadian and British writers, no matter where the writer’s gaze happened to land. Like their contemporaries in other parts of the world, these men were primarily interested in creating representations of landscapes that accorded with their own set of values, those of order, respectability, and British civilization. These depictions, Little argues, also were used in the service of nationalism, particularly for Canadian and British writers who saw geography as playing a critical role in the development of national identities and characters. In contrast, the American writers whose work Little examines were more interested in searching out quaint habitant culture, the “romantic folk culture” of Cape Breton’s Highlands (p. 8), or views of the sublime along the coast of Labrador. Yet, no matter what the writers’ national vantage point, for the most part their accounts saw people and their varied histories as being of less interest than scenery, a pattern in travel writing about Canada that, according to Little, persisted long into the age of automobile travel and tourism.Republishing one’s own work as a collection of essays has its pitfalls, not least of them being that readers may find few new insights. To some extent Little has avoided this problem by providing some new material and by writing a clear introduction and afterword; the former frames these essays well, while the latter suggests the ways in which scholars of twentieth-century tourism and travel in Canada might take up, expand upon, and test his insights and arguments. Furthermore, journal articles and book chapters in other collections do not have 247Comptes rendus / Book Reviewsthe same impact and weight as a collection of essays with this degree of thematic unity. As I moved from one chapter to another, Little’s arguments about the cultural power that the picturesque wielded over these writers becomes more convincing than if I had read articles dispersed in different places over time. The collection has other strengths, not least Little’s fluid and engaging style and the clarity of his prose; it also will introduce readers unfamiliar with the field to a range of nineteenth-century travel writing about Canada (and provides a very helpful bibliography of those sources). Little’s discussion of tourism at Lake Memphremagog is, from my perspective, one of the particularly strong chapters, since it allows the reader to appreciate the interaction between travel writing and social practices as well as the subsequent changes to the physical landscape wrought by that dynamic. In contrast, other chapters do not give us a clear sense of the reception of these accounts: I would have very much liked to know about the import and impact of their dissemination. Some English Canadian tourists in Britain, for example, hoped not to encounter Kipling’s representations of Canada in any form, direct or indirect, ones that Little discusses in chapter 9, “Our Lady of the Snows Revisited.” In turn, those images of Canada as a land of agricultural bounty found in George Munro Grant’s 1880s Picturesque Canada were foregrounded in the promotional literature disseminated by Canadian immigration agents in Edwardian Britain. That said, Little’s contributions to this area provide richness and depth to our understanding of the Dominion’s place within the international map of travel literature. By bringing together travel accounts written not just by Canadians but also by British and American men, Little’s collection demonstrates that travel—and tourism—tied Canada to a range of worlds. Although the use of imperial lenses to survey the Canadian landscape will not surprise readers familiar with British World historiography, the interest of American travel writers in Labrador or Cape Breton reminds us that travel and tourism were, after all, transnational phenomena. In the Canadian context, where much work on transnationalism focuses on the twentieth century, Little’s essays suggest that nineteenth-century tourism provides a significant vantage point for understanding the interplay of different discourses and performances of “nation” that occurred within the Dominion’s borders.Yet, despite the collection’s strengths, it either leaves some questions unanswered or elides others. While no one collection can cover everything, Little’s rationale for omitting Ontario on the basis that the province has been adequately covered by Patricia Jasen’s 1995 monograph, Wild Things, is curious. While certainly fine work, a monograph published 23 years ago about selected tourist sites is not the last word on the subject; even a cursory glance at Gerald M. Craig’s 1955 edited accounts, Early Travellers in the Canadas, would suggest more room for further research. Moreover, not all were so eager to focus solely on pastoral landscapes; Janet Dorothy Larkin’s Overcoming Niagara (2018) demonstrates that mid-nineteenth-century visitors to and residents of Upper Canada were fascinated with the technological progress embodied in the colony’s canals, particularly the Welland. Even more perplexing is Little’s analysis of the role played by gender. He focuses on men’s travel accounts since, from his perspective, women’s travel 248 Histoire sociale / Social Historywriting about Canada has been adequately covered by Françoise Lejeune’s 2012 The Feminine Experience in the Margins of the British Empire; her study, though, published by Edwin Mellen Press, looks primarily at a handful of well-known writers, such as Susanna Moodie, Frances Wright, Catherine Parr Traill, and Anna Jameson. Furthermore, while much can be inferred about masculinity from the writings Little explores, he refrains from giving gender as much weight as he does other categories, a choice based primarily on his argument that men’s use of the picturesque (a genre he argues has been associated with women’s travel writing) makes gender somehow less salient. Such an argument, though, at the very least does not take into account the different degrees of ease with which white, middle-class men travelled in the nineteenth century. Moreover, rather than provide more nuance to the frameworks set out by earlier scholars in the field who analyzed the imperial dimensions of men’s travel writings, Little instead prefers simply to contradict them (particularly Mary Louise Pratt’s work). Yet, much recent scholarship in journals such as Studies in Travel Writing and Journal of Tourism History on the history of gender, travel, tourism, and imperialism has provided such nuance, demonstrating that the theoretical baby need not be thrown out with (or by) the empirical bathwater. It is, I think, telling that those previously published essays in this book did not appear in such journals: a different set of readers might have pushed Little to refine or complicate his arguments and insights.Cecilia MorganUniversity of TorontolivErAnt, Bettina – Buying Happiness: The Emergence of Consumer Consciousness in English Canada. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2018. Pp. 291. Buying Happiness traces transformations in Canadian consumers from the late nineteenth century to the 1960s. It is a long-range study that historicizes the moral economies of spending in this period. Bettina Liverant argues that Canadian consumer society evolved in historically specific ways. She identifies key moments when the lines between being a citizen and a consumer begin to blur. The author has meticulously drawn from varied sources and collates them in inventive ways. The overall argument and its supporting claims are convincing and substantive. My sole frustration is with the book’s organization. The book is designed to flow chronologically, and it does not serve her arguments well. Using chronology as an organizing principle obfuscates the themes. I could see a graduate student quickly skipping to the sixth chapter, which, in sharing its title with the book, would seem to hold its main matter. Therein lies a risk of the reader missing nuance, and of the book appearing to be yet another study of the role of women in postwar North Atlantic reconstruction. Unlike the book, this review is organized thematically in its discussion of Buying Happiness’s key claims. 

Little, J. L. – Fashioning the Canadian Landscape: Essays on Travel Writing, Tourism, and National Identity in the Pre-Automobile Era.

https://hssh.journals.yorku.ca/index.php/hssh/article/download/41008/37201

Little, J. L. – Fashioning the Canadian Landscape: Essays on Travel Writing, Tourism, and National Identity in the Pre-Automobile Era.

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Histoire sociale / Social History (E-Journal, York University)