 |
[email protected] |
 |
3275638434 |
 |
 |
| Paper Publishing WeChat |
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Interpreting The Clockmaker from the Perspective of Greenblatt’s Cultural Poetics
YAN Dan-dan, WEI Li
Full-Text PDF
XML 1360 Views
DOI:10.17265/2159-5836/2020.04.004
Inner Mongolia University, Hohhot, China
Thomas•C•Haliburton (1796-1865) establishes a literary fame as “the first Canadian writer to establish an international reputation” and a great humorist, with the publication of his masterpiece The Clockmaker (1836). Centering on Nova Scotia, the origin place of Canadian literature and the first British colony in Canada, the book conveys deep concerns on local reality under the British colonization in the 1830s. Haliburton as a Loyalist firmly opposes violent revolution against the British Empire whereas promotes gradual evolution in the colony. This is a typical demonstration of ideological contradictions in colonies. Greenblatt’s Cultural Poetics generally explores political consciousness and ideology in literary texts. It surpasses the dichotomy mode of Western radical ideology and never views the relationship between domination and resistance as a simple confrontation. From the perspective of Greenblatt’s Culture Poetics, this essay interprets the process of “improvisation of power”, “subversion” and “containment” in the colony reflected in The Clockmaker in order to explore Nova Scotians’ awakening of independence awareness in the 1830s.
The Clockmaker, Greenblatt’s Cultural Poetics, independence awareness
George, P. L. (1985). Another look at Halliburton and his publisher Joseph Howe and Richard Bentley: The Colonial author and his Milieu. The Thomas Chandler Haliburton Symposium, 90.
Haliburton, T. C. (1836). The Clockmaker (The First and Second Series). Toronto: McClelland & Stewart Limited.
Jade, F. (2013). Discounting slavery—The currency wars, minstrelsy, and “The White Nigger” in Thomas Chandler Haliburton’s The Clockmaker. Gillian Roberts, David Stirrup, Parallel Encounters: Culture at the Canada-US Border (pp. 243-259). Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press.
Kenworthy, O. G. (2009). The political other in the nineteenth-century British North American: The Satire of Thomas Chandler Haliburton. Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 7, 205-234.
Kenworthy, O. G. (2015). Parish of the empire: Settler ambivalence in T C Haliburton’s The Clockmaker”. Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 51, 685-696.
Northrop, F. (2003). Haliburton: Mask and ego. In J. O’Grady and D. Staines (Eds.), Northrop Frye on Canada (pp. 316-320). Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Paul, F. (2011). The perfect story: Anecdote and exemplarity in Linnaeus and Blumenberg. Thesis Eleven, 104, 72-86.
Stephen, G. (1980). The improvisation of power. Renaissance self-fashioning: From more to Shakespeare. Diss.U of Chicago.
Stephen, G. (1988). Invisible Bullets. Shakespeare negotiation:The circulation of social energy in Renaissance England. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Stephen, G. (2007). Learning to curse. London: Routledge.
Thomas, H. (2012). The British Empire in the Atlantic: Nova Scotia, the board of trade, and the evolution of imperial rule in the mid-eighteenth century. Ottawa: University of Ottawa.