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This essay focuses on the book "When Alice Lay Down with Peter" by Margaret Sweatman. The book focuses on a pair of Scottish settlers and their descendants in the Canadian West and is preoccupied with the fraudulence of their presence, using ghosts to raise postcolonial questions about claims to the land. The book illustrates Sweatman's belief that ghosts, as reminders of change, of mortality, of the hazards of political fanaticism, are allies of people in a struggle against a political and historiographical absolutism that has only deepened repressed rather than resolved.

Examines the use of italics in Timothy Findley's novels. Findley's contribution to the development of postmodern textual strategies characteristics of Canadian fiction; Appropriateness of calling Findley a postmodernist; Contribution of italics to the misgivings of his readers; Significant of italics in Findley's works.

Deals with the aesthetics of regionalism in a globalized age. Consolidation of Canadian and American literature; Changes in the political, cultural, economic and intellectual climate of North America which have prompted reassessments of regionalism; Paradoxes of regionalist criticisms.