Abstract

Canadian Modernism and modernity have had profound effects on how Canadian literary scholars approach rural Ontario literature, rural class systems and rural Ontario feminist practices. In fact few rural Ontario writers are widely studied in a regional context. Instead, the focus for writers like Nellie McClung and Emily Ferguson remains rooted in explorations of their achievements for suffrage in the West, while study of Ontario's Christian Social Activist writers like Ralph Connor and Marian Keith have largely fallen out of favour because their religious convictions seem antiquated in a modern context. However, these authors are still important in terms of establishing cultural continuity with more contemporary rural Ontario writers like Alice Munro, Al Purdy, Phil Hall, and the undeservingly neglected George Elliott. These more contemporary works are concerned with the tangible effects of modernist thought and modernity on rural Ontarians' understanding of their own subjectivities. Instead of evolving a culture that is coherent with their transatlantic and settler histories, they have been forced to deal with the cultural void left by the emergence of Canadian modernism by adopting symbolic stereotypes of rural culture imposed by urban instruments of marketing and mass cultural production. These products of the "symbolic rural" lift the cultural implications of the rural from its specific ties to place and history, constructing false generalizations about class and gender identities that can fit cleanly into the predominantly urban context of modernist ideologies.