Anxious Allegiances - Legitimizing Identity in the Early Canadian Long Poem (Electronic book text)

Relying upon deconstruction, discourse analysis, and close examination of contemporary historical events, Mazoff identifies and explores the periodic "ruptures" in the texts - inconsistencies, contradictions, anomalies, and deflections - that underscore the tension between the "unsaid" (the real historical, economic, and social conditions) and the surface level of the narrative (the aesthetic and genre constraints). His analysis reveals the extent to which problems of allegiance, anxiety, and identity were inextricably involved in the colonial and national projects, an involvement which the poetry, despite its intentions, could neither mask nor resolve.