Time, memory and transformation : representations of development in the Nova Scotian novel

Abstract

Hugh MacLennan's Barometer Rising, Charles Bruce's The Channel Shore, and Ernest Buckler's The Mountain and the Valley and The Cruelest Month are concerned with the transformation of pre-modern rural communities to a modernized countryside. My analysis of these novels will be based on an historically grounded interdisciplinary perspective which will clearly show the inadequacies of previous interpretations. Such issues as rural/urban polarities, an experience of a radical discontinuity with the past, a quest for some sense of continuity, the decline of small commodity production, the growth of the marketplace, the expansion of wage labour, changing gender roles for women, and the rapid commodification of so much of our reality are found throughout their works.

Hugh MacLennan, in Barometer Rising, favours capitalist development combined with a form of middle class individualism. Charles Bruce's The Channel Shore is pervaded by a sense of uncertainty, a deeply rooted ambiguity about modernity that is never finally resolved. Ernest Buckler, however, rejects modernity in all its guises. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)