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Domestically produced Canadian superheroes face an uphill climb in their bids to be taken seriously. A domestically produced Canadian comic is one that is authored and published within Canada or within a territory on what is called Canada. Canada's troubled sociopolitical relationships with nationalism, colonialism, federalism, and separatism, merge with notorious Canadian stereotypes—like national inferiority complexes and apology culture—and serve to unnerve and disarm the Canadian superhero. While psychosocial in nature, these feelings, unconsciously nationalized, are rooted in cultural economics where imports from Britain or the United States are perceived to have higher financial and social value. These unsettlements continually prompt Canadian readers to question whether they can—or should—identify with a domestically produced Canadian superhero in le neuvième art. The answer tentatively seems to be yes, but only if they are humbled, satirized, or taken down a peg—knowingly or unknowingly, or only if these heroes are, in some manner, reflectively self-deprecating. Richard Comely's early run on the Captain Canuck franchise, particularly in his promotional pre-Captain Canuck no. 1 paratexts, root the character in deprecation as the hero is mocked and satirized by the citizens of his own comic. This fate is uniquely applied to Canuck while other nationalist and provincial superheroes—such as Pierre Fournier's Les Aventures du Capitaine Kébec (1973) and Mark Allard-Will's and Elaine Will's Saskatch-A-Man (2015)—engage in self-mockery without accidental patronization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With a constantly evolving and newly erupting menu of scandals over the period extending from 2015 to the present, a sense of crisis has been instilled in Canadian literature. Whither CanLit? These continually unfolding scandals have pushed some scholars to respond through various attempts at inventory-taking. This article asks: are the kinds of inventory-taking the field is conducting somehow paradoxically deleterious? Is shame as an affect a productive way for processing and healing trauma? Does the current solution to unfolding scandals in the industry of Canadian literature, that of waging shame, actually preclude the resolution of scandal? Does waging shame reinforce the process of trauma itself? Is there some kind of misapprehension of shame as an affect in literary and cultural studies that might be augmented with a more medical understanding of the effects of shame on human beings? In short, what happens when shame becomes a disciplinary identity? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that expressions of national identity in twentiethcentury Euro-Canadian literature often conceive of the nation as existing in both ethnic and ostensibly pluralist, immigration-based models, and that the former is frequently valorized over the latter, resulting in the implicit legitimation of settler colonialism. It does so by examining a few major theorizations of nationalism--constructivism, ethno-symbolism, and ethnonationalism--and suggesting that literary critics' frequent adherence to the constructivism of Benedict Anderson can sometimes obscure the aforementioned dynamic. Finally, this article reads Laura Goodman Salverson's The Viking Heart (1923) as a text that renders in all its contradiction the problem of ethnicity and nation in Canada, arguing that Salverson combines (but does not synthesize) the twin forces of ethnicity and liberal pluralism that make up the Euro-Canadian imagination's split conception of the nation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]