Landscape and history in Jane Urquhart's Away

Abstract

Abstract:This article proposes to read the landscape in Jane Urquhart's Away both as a stratigraphy of memories and as a cultural medium that not only symbolises power relations but also works as an agent of power. Through investigating the dehistoricised and decontextualised landscape in Northrop Frye's garrison mentality, the article argues that Away refuses to participate in the colonialist operation of reducing the Canadian topography to terra nullius by raising the issue of amnesia and restoring the trauma of history to the landscape that has been emptied of its layered past for (re-)territorialisation.