You Can’t Get There From Here: The Past as Present in Small-Town Ontario Fiction

By: Ryan Porter

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Synopsis: Rather than reading small-town representations within works as portraits of a provincial past, this book claims that they are best understood as projections emerging from an urban present. As Ontario urbanized over the past century, small towns became a popular literary trope, and Ryan Porter argues that literary small-town Ontario functioned, and functions still, as not only a refraction but also as an exploration of the province’s dominant urban modernity. Utilizing theories from heritage scholars, who view popularly understood pasts as conforming to the zeitgeist of the present, You Can’t Get There from Here argues that the literary small-town Ontario past is malleable, consisting of attempts to come to terms with the present in which the narrators find themselves. The book focuses on four key Ontario authors – Stephen Leacock, Robertson Davies, Alice Munro, and Jane Urquhart – as well as many secondary authors, and links the readings to much broader trends in actual Ontario towns and in popular culture.