“Annals of Ice: Formations of Empire, Place and History in John Galt and Alice Munro,” in Scottish Literature and Postcolonial Literature: Comparative Texts and Critical Perspectives, eds. Michael Gardiner, Graeme MacDonald and Niall O’Gallagher (2011)
This chapter reviews Scotland’s most complex nineteenth-century colonial novel, John Galt’s half-forgotten 1831 Bogle Corbet, or the Emigrants, against Alice Munro’s fiction. Galt and Munro inhabit very different temporal, political and literary moments, yet describe the same area, in present-day Ontario, while sharing an interest in the local texture of historical experience, using annalistic accretion to ground new forms of historical fiction.