Storm and Dissonance: L. M. Montgomery and Conflict
Editor: Jean Mitchell
Date Of Publication: Jan 2008
Isbn13: 9781847184337
Isbn: 1-84718-433-2
This collection of essays explores the darker side of L.M. Montgomery’s fiction and life writing. An international best-selling novelist, Montgomery’s many novels, particularly Anne of Green Gables, have enchanted readers for over a century. However, Montgomery’s own disenchantment made evident with the posthumous publication of her private journals, ruptured the easy conflation of Montgomery as author and person. The tension between public enchantment and private discontent informs Montgomery’s work and life. By exploring the more transgressive aspects of Montgomery’s writing, these essays provide new insights into the complexity of her work and life. Montgomery’s gentle landscapes and optimistic stories, as the authors suggest, often contain undercurrents of anger, malice, obsession, loss and violence. As one contributor, Margaret Doody, argues “destructiveness plays around the edges of all of her fiction.” Essays explore the anguish of mother loss, her ambivalent depictions of the maternal, the experiences War and the Great Depression as well as a range of issues related to gender, class, nature and social and cultural change. Attention to the dissonance and conflict as these essays demonstrates, provides compelling and new space for theoretical readings of Montgomery’s work.

Jean Mitchell is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Island Studies at the University of Prince Edward Island where she has recently been the Scholar-in-Residence at the Lucy Maud Montgomery Institute (LMMI) in Prince Edward Island, Canada.

“In the past quarter century, L. M. Montgomery has emerged as the most internationally influential Canadian writer of the first half of the 20th century . . . Feminism and cultural studies took a sledgehammer to the modernists and other critics who had trashed her books, deeming them suitable only for undiscriminating people (such as women and children). This coincided with the publication, starting in 1985, of Montgomery’s own personal journals, kept from 1889 to 1942. They revealed an incredibly complex and well-read woman, one as witty as she was tortured. . . . In this remarkable collection of essays, scholars delve into ‘the surprising darkness, the unexpected violence, . . .’ that haunt the margins of Montgomery’s work before the reader gets to her ‘happy endings.’”

Mary Henley Rubio, Professor Emeritus, University of Guelph, Ontario, Canada.

“Storm and Dissonance is a collection of inter-related essays that explore how and why Montgomery’s ‘gentle landscapes and optimistic stories contain undercurrents of anger, malice, relentless gossip, obsession, and violence.’ Brilliantly edited and introduced by Island-born Anthropologist Jean Mitchell, the essays enrich our understanding of Montgomery’s complex ways of coding experiences and perceptions. This book is a must-read for anyone interested in Montgomery’s artistry and in her creation of cultural images that resonate more than one hundred years later.”

Elizabeth Rollins Epperly, author of Through Lover’s Lane: L. M. Montgomery’s Photography and Visual Imagination (2007).

"Mitchell has brought together many prominent Montgomery scholars, impressive in the range of their critical methods and perspectives, for a roundtable discussion that provides constant surprises, including penetrating essays by Carole Gerson, Margaret Doody, and Benjamin Lefebvre, to name only a few ... Both students and seasoned Montgomery scholars will delight in the thought-provoking research perspectives that these authors undertake."

Sean Somers, Canadian Literature No. 202, Autumn 2009

Price Uk Gbp: 39.99
Price Us Usd: 59.99

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