Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
1991
Abstract
Over the past several years, Western Producer Prairie Books has published volumes that demonstrate-quite apart from the materials they offer and the arguments they advancethe enduring "lure of the land" felt by English-Canadians (both prairie dwellers and those living elsewhere) toward their prairie as an evocative and formative landscape. Ronald Rees's Land of Earth and Sky: Landscape Painting of Western Canada (1984) and New and Naked Land: Making the Prairies Home (1988), from the same press, and now R. Douglas Francis's Images of the West, suggest that Western Producer is tapping a general interest in the Canadian prairie landscape as subject broader than the scholarly audience presupposed by such works as Edward A. McCourt's The Canadian West in Fiction (1947; revised 1970), Laurence Ricou's Vertical Man/Horizontal World (1973), Dick Harrison's Unnamed Country (1977), or my own The Great Prairie Fact and Literary Imagination (1989). Indeed, while drawing upon these and other antecedents, Francis-a Canadian intellectual historian teaching at the University of Calgary-aims primarily at "the general reader [rather] than for the specialist" in order to examine "the changing images of the West over the entire three centuries of exploration and settlement by the white man" (xvii, xvi).
Comments
Published in GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY 11:4 (Fall 1991). Copyright © 1991 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln.