A History of Canadian CultureFrom Dorset sculpture to traveling circuses to the Barenaked Ladies, award-winning historian Jonathan Vance reveals a storyteller's ear for narrative. In a country of unparalleled diversity, "culture" has many different shades of importance and meaning. A stranded Innu woman found by eighteenth-century explorers in the wind-swept Arctic took the time to decorate her clothing with rich designs. The explorers were taken aback; but Vance informs us that the Inuit word meaning "to make poetry" is the same as the word for "breathe"; and both derive from the word for "the soul." Unsurprisingly, Aboriginal culture began to change with the arrival of more Europeans (who brought their own ideas about culture) in one of the many complicated and intertwined tales that Vance weaves together to explore Canada's cultural history. Vance considers other key issues. Where, for example, is the divide between "culture" and mass entertainment? He describes plays created by sailors trapped in an ice-bound ship through the Arctic winter; "occasionally lewd" tavern music; an early version of Macbeth with a Monty Pythonesque twist--in Canada, so-called high and low culture have coexisted uneasily, and intermingled creatively. Vance reveals that the hot-button cultural issues we all know and love--government funding for the arts, the cultural brain drain, the drive to preserve distinctly Canadian forms of expression, concerns over copyright protection, the economic impact of cultural industries--can be traced back to previous centuries. Taking into account both the past and modern developments, such as the thriving culture of Quebec and the evolution of the CBC, Vance addresses one of the quintessential anxieties of Canadians--where, and what, is our culture? |
From inside the book
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... modernists ( they both poked fun at the fond- ness of Canadian art collectors for Dutch barnyard paintings ) . But the last word went to Jackson , who looked ahead to the day when he was viewed as one of the old guard . ' When the last ...
... modernism , but the modernists themselves preferred to meet their critics with liberal doses of sarcasm . Their principal vehicle was Canadian Forum , but they also established the McGill Fortnightly Review ( 1925–27 ) and Canadian ...
... modernists were up to the task . Novelist Watson Griffin put his response into the mouth of the heroine in The Gulf ... modernism had not caught on in Canada - but why ? As far as its prac- titioners were concerned , it was because of ...
Contents
The First Artists | 1 |
The Meeting and Mingling of Cultures | 24 |
Colonial Societies | 41 |
Copyright | |
16 other sections not shown