1White Civility: the Literary Project of English Canada is a decisive contribution to the identification and understanding of the narrative staples through which English Canada has sought to express the legitimacy of a national project distinct from its colonial antecedents and its American counterpart. Having stated that “White Canadian culture is obsessed, and organized by its obsession, with the problem of its own civility,” this study unravels the racial, political and cultural forces interlocking in the formation of an English Canadianness whose normative effect resides in “the formulation and elaboration of a specific form of whiteness based on a British model of civility” (5).

2Coleman’s critique of the ongoing role played by civility in Canadian nation-building is informed by a double theoretical standpoint. His approach is firmly grounded in the cultural theory developed by Benedict Anderson, Stuart Hall and Homi Bhabha, particularly their analyses of the transitivity of narrative and the ideological mutations impelled by the circulation and dissemination of stories. But White Civility also builds upon the legacy of a home-grown critical tradition which, from George Grant’s Lament for a Nation (1965), Carl Berger’s The Sense of Power (1970), Terry Goldie’s Fear and Temptation (1989), until more recently Jonathan Kertzer’s Worrying the Nation (1998), has vigorously engaged with the historical claims of Canadian nationalism, querying the imbrication of race, power, and gender relations in the country’s cultural productions.

3Yet the corpus Coleman selected for his investigation sets him quite apart from his predecessors. By choosing as his prime material one century of popular fiction, along with a selection of poetry, drama, journalism and political writings published between 1850 and 1950, Coleman makes a fresh foray into the morass of the national unconscious before the recommendations of the 1951 Massey Commission took effect, and the forging of a Canadian identity became a state-sponsored enterprise. “As a result,” Coleman underlines, “the most influential writers of this period employed popular, formulaic modes of writing that appealed to large, non-elite audiences in order to shape popular views in advance of the pedagogies of the state” (36). Rejecting the covert narrative of progress that tends to orientate contemporary assessments of Canada’s coming of age, Coleman’s genealogical approach identifies four recurring allegories in the national best-sellers of the previous centuries. Through the powerful vector of mainstream culture, the figures of the Loyalist brother, the enterprising Scottish orphan, the muscular Christian, and the maturing colonial son have served to spread the normative values of a civil ideal among a population of increasingly heterogeneous backgrounds. After a robust introduction, each allegorical representation receives a separate treatment in a chapter which retraces the historical circumstances surrounding its inception in popular fiction, its modulation in later works and its relevance to contemporary cultural issues as, for instance, Canada’s official multiculturalism policy, the representation of First Nations or the promotion of Canada’s image as an international peace-keeper.

4Although the emphasis regularly falls on individual works and the type of allegory they best exemplify, Coleman never loses from sight the overarching cohesion of the national project underlying them: “the idea of civility as a (White) cultural practice not only made it a mode of internal management and self-definition […] but it also made it a mode of external management, because it gave civil subjects a mandate for managing the circumstances of those perceived as uncivil” (13). Probing the shifting limits of an inclusive Canadian civis leads Coleman to examine the multiple exclusions on the basis of race, gender, or political allegiance which became naturalized as the formula stories embedding allegories of the national growth were gaining in popularity. White Civility exposes the coercive power exerted by familiar plots and clichés, and the persuasiveness they derive from the didactic and performative functions of allegory.

5Following Walter Benjamin and Paul de Man, Daniel Coleman works at the symbolic fissure which, because it is constitutive of allegory’s double-speaking, undermines a signification the duplicitous trope poses as self-evident. To take but one example, Coleman’s reading of the fraternal allegory in Loyalist literature exposes the fratricide story lurking behind the plot of so many early Canadian novels. This particular instance demonstrates that literary scholarship can add a fresh perspective on grounds that are still debated among historians, as White Civility makes explicit the disavowal of violence regarded by many as characteristic of the genealogy of Britain in America. This study also holds valuable findings for readers whose interests extend beyond the North American sphere, towards postcolonial studies or cultural theory in the widest sense. In this respect, there is much to be learnt from Coleman’s discussion of whiteness in relation to Britishness. After recalling the dismal prospects the Celtic populations of Ireland and Scotland faced at the close of the eighteenth century, Coleman analyses how the Scots, rising to the opportunities of imperial expansion, invented the loose category of Britishness as an alternative to an aristocratic Englishness which excluded them from the venues of power. Once in Canada, influential Scottish circles invested Britishness with values and interests clearly indebted to the Scottish Enlightenment ideology of self-improvement. Coleman then demonstrates “how the Scots inserted themselves at the head of the procession in Canada and how, by means of the mediating concept of Britishness, they created the Canadian version of Englishness in their own image” (82).

6At the junction between cultural theory and literary criticism, this fascinating study contributes to dispelling the illusion that Canadian culture and identity arose ex nihilo in the centennial decade. It throws into relief the role Canadian writers played in the English-speaking world as purveyors of popular entertainment, well before the advent of best-selling authors as Mazo de la Roche or Margaret Atwood. Northrop Frye once contended that popular culture constitutes the subsoil from which high art draws its most potent imaginative ferments. In this sense, White Civility confirms that examining the ideological tenets given currency in the popular fiction of the past holds promises for a critical understanding of the present.