![]() ![]() ![]() Sugars states that the Gothic is the response to an “anxiety about history,” that ghosts connect the people to their history in one way or another, and that if ghosts did not exist-as Voltaire would undoubtedly say-it would be necessary to invent them. ![]() ![]() It is important to note that she is using the term “Gothic” in the modern postcolonial sense: “concerned less with overt scenes of romance and horror” and more “with experiences of spectrality and the uncanny.” 1 She begins her argument with the statement that two of the most famous poems in Canadian literature-Robert Service’s The Cremation of Sam McGee and John McCrae’s In Flanders Fields-contain ghosts, challenging the oft-repeated assertion that Canada suffers from a lack of them. Sugars’s book traces the appropriation of the Gothic tradition by Canadian (and pre-Canadian) writers in the service of creating a national literature and a national identity. I am not sure if this makes me the last person who should be reviewing Cynthia Sugars’s Canadian Gothic: Literature, History and the Spectre of Self-Invention or the absolutely right one. Not only am I not a scholar of the Gothic, but my understanding of the Gothic, until now, has been almost completely intuitive, born of an abiding taste for Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, a youthful devotion to Stephen King and a curiosity about the Grant Wood painting American Gothic. ![]()
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