"Space" invasion: Jewish Canadian women writers and the reshaping of Canadian literature

Abstract

Almost as quickly as the Canadian canon was put together with land as its central motif, it began to be dismantled in favour of new approaches to “space.” The (ab)use of land in Canadian writing became quickly linked to patriarchal and imperialist systems of control masked behind a guise of “universalism.” Jewish Canadian women writers provide an excellent example of space’s advantageous provision of unfixed, renewable literary images and a shifting environment within which one can work out complicated questions of identity. By setting fictional works in “Jewish chronotopes,” writers such as Anne Michaels and Nancy Richler in Fugitive Pieces and Your Mouth is Lovely demonstrate that a multicultural Canada will function when the spaces —even those outside of Canada— belonging to all its citizens are represented in Canadian literature.