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L. M. Montgomery's work, including her most famous novel, Anne of Green Gables, has been tied inextricably, in both scholarship and the popular imagination, to the rural worlds of Green Gables, Avonlea and Prince Edward Island. This article positions Montgomery as a writer offering insight into early Canadian suburban life. It does so via a reading of the third "Anne" book, Anne of the Island (1915), specifically its depiction of Patty's Place, where Anne lives while a student at Redmond College (Dalhousie College) in Kingsport (Halifax, Nova Scotia). For Montgomery, the suburb is a place that combines the best of the country and the city, while moving past the limitations of both. The suburb gives Anne a home and a place of belonging in a new, urban world. Patty's Place also offers the possibility of transformation and independence, especially for women, more than any other place in the novel. This article not only provides a new perspective on one of Canada's best-loved writers, but also contributes to a slowly growing but long overdue discussion of the city and suburbs in Canadian literary criticism, which is still largely preoccupied with notions of the wilderness and of the north. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Deep-seated educational discourses have blamed low-income communities for their youth's lack of high school completion. These deficit discourses reflect top-down knowledge hierarchies and a lack of knowledge democracy in education (de Sousa Santos 2007; Hall & Tandon 2017; Visvanathan 2009), and they are in need of 'critical and diverse knowledge reckoning' (Malone 2019, p. 2) by low-income communities themselves. This article relays how a community-university participatory action research (PAR) partnership became a dynamic site of knowledge democracy from which to counter and transform deficit-based knowledge systems imposed on economically disadvantaged communities. Steeped in the generative enactments of PAR, storytelling, ecological metaphor, strength-based approaches and the arts, this article explores a low-income/social housing community's knowledge practices that are energising and growing its community power to support the success of their youth in school. These seven knowledge practices are narrated through the ecological metaphor of trees, specifically via a co-constructed PAR team narrative called the Tree of Community Knowledge and Engagement. In the telling and retelling of this counternarrative-in-the-making, this article embodies knowledge democracy. Here, community members' energising knowledge practices are recognised as invaluable forms of everyday educational knowing and leadership for their youth. This article further explores three broad ways of knowing that reside within and across community members' seven knowledge practices: lived knowing, interconnected knowing and participatory/power-in-relation knowing. The three community ways of knowing illustrate how the community is growing its power to support youth's success via a transformative educational worldview, from which other schools and universities could learn and, indeed, thrive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article posits elite metropolitan culture centred on London's West End as a significant force shaping Romantic-period suburbs. It furthermore explores the experiences that elite women – from the affluent middling ranks, the gentry, and the nobility – had of suburban homes. I consider three key types of suburban: West End relationships characterized, respectively, by transplantation of the beau monde to the suburbs, middling-rank emulation of fashion, and retreat from the West End. I explore whether or not these various suburban–West End interpenetrations allow women to achieve physical health, emotional well-being, social standing, and financial stability. Ultimately, I argue that Smith presents a suburban retreat occupied by noble and gentry characters as most successful in these terms. This investigation intervenes in debates on the suburbs taking place in literary Romanticism and more generally in the field of pre-railway suburban history. In particular, I move beyond the social ranks and lifestyles conventionally included in suburban scholarship, such as virtuous middling-rank activity. This article moreover reveals Charlotte Smith – whose writing on rural and natural places and landscapes scholars have celebrated – as an astute commentator on (sub)urban spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]