‘The worst loups-garous that one can meet’: Reading the Werewolf in the Canadian ‘Wilderness’

2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 64-80
Author(s):  
Kaja Franck

Ginger Snaps (2000) has been recognised as a significant example of feminist horror. This article analyses the final film in the trilogy, Ginger Snaps Back: The Beginning (2004). On first appearance, Ginger Snaps Back reacts to the ending of the first film, in which Brigitte kills her lupine sister Ginger. Set in the nineteenth century, the film draws on Canadian Gothic tropes with the two sisters trapped in an isolated fort, surrounded by frozen forest. In doing so, it echoes another Canadian werewolf narrative, Henry Beaugrand's ‘The Werwolves' (1898). Beaugrand's story opens with a group of settler-colonisers spending the Christmas period in Fort Richelieu, Quebec. This location evokes North American fears, and the representation of the wooded wilderness as full of wild beasts and wild men. Beaugrand collapses the ‘wild beasts’ and ‘wild men’ into one hybrid monster. By comparing the depiction of werewolves in Ginger Snaps Back and Beaugrand's story, this article uncovers the implications of ignoring and appropriating Native Canadian folklore.

2016 ◽  
Vol 85 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Anne F. Hyde

This essay, a revised version of the August 2015 talk, examines the story of two mixed-blood women, indigenous and Anglo American, who lived in the fur trade North American West. The essay examines a racial category, mixed blood or “half-breed” and considers the challenges for people who lived in and used that category in the nineteenth century. The essay illuminates the challenges of using different kinds of personal records to understand how these nineteenth-century women might have thought about identity, a word they never would have used.


Author(s):  
Jonathan Hehn

This chapter outlines the history of Presbyterian worship practice from the sixteenth century to the present, with a focus on North American Presbyterians. Tracing both their hymnody and their liturgy ultimately to John Calvin, Presbyterian communions have a distinct heritage of worship inherited from the Church of Scotland via seventeenth-century Puritans. Long marked by metrical psalmody and guided by the Westminster Directory, Presbyterian worship underwent substantial changes in the nineteenth century. Evangelical and liturgical movements led Presbyterians away from a Puritan visual aesthetic, into the use of nonscriptural hymnody, and toward a recovery of liturgical books. Mainline North American and Scottish Presbyterians solidified these trends in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries; however, conservative North American denominations and some other denominations globally continue to rely heavily on the use of a worship directory and metrical psalmody.


Author(s):  
Abigail Williams

This chapter attempts to recover the history of how and why we read communally. While increasing literacy and access to books undoubtedly made solitary reading possible for some, there were many reasons why individuals continued to read together. Some of these had to do with control over what was being read, and how: the perceived social benefits of being together, of the book as the basis for communal entertainment, performance, and discussion. But there were also straightforwardly practical reasons—light and sight. Up until the advent of the Argand oil lamp, and cheap supplies of North American mineral oil in the early nineteenth century, domestic lighting was primitive, and prohibitively expensive. Another technical obstacle to easy reading was limited ophthalmology. Reading aloud gave those with failing vision access to books and letters, and many read with others' eyes.


Author(s):  
Frank Towers

Whereas the introduction to this volume focused on the question of sovereignty and the nation-state, our conclusion takes stock of another important theme of this volume, writing North American history outside of a national framework. Riding the crest of a wave of studies on transnational and global comparative studies of the nineteenth century, historians working in this field would do well to pause briefly to take stock of its achievements, limitations, and future research questions....


2019 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 22-45
Author(s):  
Timothy Donahue

Abstract This essay shows how literary parataxis serves as an engine of transnational thought in the nineteenth-century North American West. I focus, in particular, on how Mark Twain’s Roughing It (1872) and Sarah Winnemucca’s Life Among the Piutes (1883) employ paratactic forms to present the Great Basin as a space where no single nation rules as sovereign. Amidst US settler colonialism, I argue, such paratactic aesthetics prove politically double-edged. While parataxis’ tendency to destabilize hierarchies allows the form to undermine US claims to sovereignty, the same deconstructive proclivity can occlude Indigenous political distinction and historical priority. Twain and Winnemucca respond to this aesthetic scenario differently, and their writing, consequently, presents competing conceptions of transnationalism. Twain’s unchecked embrace of paratactic forms yields a transnational vision whose emphasis on social movement and mixture proves antithetical to Indigenous sovereignty. Winnemucca, by contrast, employs a modulated parataxis in order to locate the transnational in collisions of countervailing polities and thereby better represents the political standing and agency of the Paiute people. Winnemucca’s accounts of her work as a translator, I further argue, suggest that amidst such collisions, political sovereignty takes a distinctive shape, as a relational and comparative project.


2010 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Edward L. Smither

The aim of the current article is to show that an important element behind the establishment of evangelical missions to Brazil � particularly during the pioneering stages � was evangelical revival, especially that which occurred in North America during the nineteenth century. Following a brief introduction to the general relationship between eighteenth- and nineteenth century revivals and evangelical missions, I shall endeavour to support historically the commonly accepted, yet often unsubstantiated, correlation between such movements of revival and mission. Firstly, I will show the significant paradigm shift in missional thinking, which took place in the nineteenth century, as North American evangelicals began to regard Roman Catholic countries in Latin America as mission fields. Secondly, I shall argue that the influence of nineteenth-century revivalist evangelicalism (particularly that sourced in North America) on missions to Brazil and Latin America can best be observed in the Brazilian evangelical identity that emerged in the twentieth century, which has, in turn, propelled the Brazilian evangelical church into its own significant involvement in global missions (Noll 2009:10).


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