Sara Jeannette Duncan, The Imperialist

Anna Snaith (Independent Scholar - Europe)

The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 3.1.2: Canadian Writing and Culture (Anglophone): The Twentieth Century and beyond, 1900-present.
Vol. editors: Sarah Henzi (Simon Fraser University), Kerry Myler (Birmingham Newman University), Glen Nichols (Mount Allison University), Wendy Roy (University of Saskatchewan), Denis Salter (McGill University), Karis Shearer (University of British Columbia)

Dates

First circulation or publication 1904

Places

Asia (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Novel

Resources

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The Imperialist

(1904) is Sara Jeannette Duncan's best-known novel. Set in Elgin, Ontario, Canada, a fictionalised version of Brantford, Duncan's home town,

The Imperialist

is Duncan's only novel with a substantial Canadian setting and signifies a literary homecoming for Duncan, who had left Canada in 1885. The novel is a detailed and sympathetic portrait of life in an “outpost of Empire”. She was intent on portraying “the real Imperial situation as it works out in colonial lives”, as she wrote in a letter, feeling that the colonial perspective had gone unheard. Set in the early years of the twentieth century and carefully researched, the novel centres around the issue of imperial federation and Canadian attitudes towards Chamberlain's (Wallingham in the novel) proposal for…

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501 words

Citation: Snaith, Anna. "The Imperialist". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 16 March 2001 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=564, accessed 23 April 2024.]

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