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A literary criticism of the book “Baltimore's Mansion” by Wayne Johnston is presented. It outlines the characters and explores the symbolic significance of these characters. It considers themes such as the national identity of Newfoundland and its history as an independent British colony, Catholic identity, and Catholic integralism.

The article discusses the writing, publication, and reception of the 1972 book "Death on the Ice: The Great Newfoundland Sealing Disaster of 1914" by Cassie Brown with Harold Horwood, an account of the deaths from exposure of dozens of sealers seen as stemming from corporate indifference to their welfare. The book, an international bestseller written by and about Newfoundlanders, is seen as a landmark in Newfoundland print culture and cultural identity. Topics discussed include sealing in Newfoundland literature, Brown's early career and development as an author, and the life cycle of her book.

The article discusses the development of medical autobiography--the life writings of physicians and allied health workers--in Newfoundland and Labrador in the 20th century, with attention to the influence on the genre of medical missionary Wilfred Thomason Grenfell (1865-1940) and the local print culture he inspired. A case study is also presented, of "Snowshoe & Lancet: Memoirs of a Frontier Newfoundland Doctor, 1937-1948," published in 2000 by American physician Robert Skidmore Ecke (1909-2001).

The article discusses the autobiography of Labrador author Lydia Campbell (1818-1905), a self-described "halfbreed" or Inuit Metis (a person of mixed Native American and European heritage), and its place in indigenous Labrador literature and culture. Campbell's life in central Labrador is discussed, as is the meaning of writing and literacy for Labrador Inuits. Her book, "Sketches of Labrador Life by a Labrador Woman," published around 1895, is discussed, as are the reasons she wrote it, and how it was received.

This article explores the myth of origin of Newfoundland in the novel "Gaff Topsails" by Patrick Kavanagh. The novel illustrates a myth of origin for the inhabitants of a small, fictional Catholic parish in Newfoundland. It also reconfigures the colonial moment as a myth of indigenous birth. The author believes that the myth is an attempt of Kavanagh to write a national narrative of Newfoundland and serves to distance Newfoundlanders both from colonial exploiters and from the Canadian identity. Kavanagh uses mythical images to put his characters in a different narrative mode from historical accounts of later colonial exploration and discovery.

This essay examines how recent fiction by Wayne Johnston and Joan Clark counters or colludes with popular cultural constructions of Newfoundland as a "strange terrain" attractive to non-Newfoundlanders because of its associations with placemyths. How do Johnston's "The Colony of Unrequited Dreams" and Clark's "Latitudes of Melt" position the nonlocal reader? As tourist? Friendly visitor? Alien invader? Whatever the case, both writers construct imagined geographies that encode and comment on the history and consequences of Newfoundland's mythologization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores a controversy over Wayne Johnston's "The Colony of Unrequited Dreams" that persists, principally inside Newfoundland, where some readers who know his sources argue that Johnston has distorted and betrayed them. Taking seriously the responsibility to history of a historical novelist, the essay nevertheless defends "Colony" as an important, if oblique, take on Newfoundland history and culture, resisting objections to the novel that disregard aesthetic criteria. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Set in mid-twentieth-century Newfoundland, "The Divine Ryans" is a haunted tale in which nine-year-old Draper Doyle narrates the story of his father's visitations in the troubled year following his death. His father appears to Draper exclusively and usually in the guise of a hockey player, hockey functioning as a substitute for the lost intimacy between father and son. In articulating this coming-of-age story in which relationships, family secrets, and sexual codes ate all mediated through the rules and references of hockey, Wayne Johnston angles his narrative toward a dispossessed postcolonial expression of the ghosts that inhabit the margins of story and settlement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Patrick Kavanagh's novel "Gaff Topsails" explores a day in the life of a Newfoundland outport on the cusp of change from the traditional life to the uncertainties of modernism. The outport depicted in the novel, although realistic in its details, is essentially mythological and archetypal, representing defining elements of Newfoundland culture, especially the primary values of community and interdependence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many critical readings of Annie Proulx's "The Shipping News," both local and outside Newfoundland, are motivated by an earnest corrective impulse, setting out to pinpoint erroneous depictions of place and character, overwrought style, or mangled metaphor. This essay argues, in contrast, that "straight," outright condemnations of Proulx's novel overlook the possibility of a camp or post-tourist reading, a reading that will allow for a playful and defamiliarizing alternative to currently circulating stories of place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Written in the wake of many novels that depict Newfoundlanders as being somehow at one with the island, Michael Crummey's "River Thieves" shows Newfound-landers as not so much of the island as in constant struggle with it. His re-creation of the quest to rescue a dwindling Beothuk population is a metaphoric voyage into the collective unconscious of Newfoundland—a communal ego imbued with feelings of pride and shame and a desire to know how things could have been. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]