Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The critical assessment of David Adams Richards's fiction provides one of the best examples in Canada of the politics of literary reception, a politics unique to the country's uneven and still tenuous federalism. The pretext of that reception holds that, as an Atlantic Canadian who is peripheral to the country's industrial center, he occupies a space deeply encoded with nostalgias of the folk, specifically of agrarian romances of work, family, and faith. His natural comparators in this realm are eastern Canada's best-loved regionalists – Lucy Maud Montgomery, Charles G. D. Roberts, and Ernest Buckler – each in different ways an adherent of the roman de la terre formula. Richards's conscious rejection of “folk” representations and regional identification, however, has given rise to a body of work that is deliberately political in its response to distant critical authorities that perpetuate delimiting nostalgias of place. His work is therefore the ground across which different versions of Atlantic Canada's socio-economic reality are frequently contested. While his readership is diverse and loyal, some of his critics have been unmerciful in attacking what they perceive as his coarsening of place. Born on October 17, 1950 into a middle-class Catholic family in the Protestant town of Newcastle (now Miramichi), New Brunswick, his upbringing amid the declining fortunes of a once booming, ... log in or subscribe to read full text