Canadianation: Remapping the popular literature of the United States of North America

This dissertation looks at twentieth-century American books written by first- and second-generation Canadian immigrants. The books I examine define different modes of American culture while they simultaneously embrace Canada in their pictures of Americanness. Through Canadianation of the landscape and characters, the authors helped create an expanded notion of "America," a space of distinct but intricately bound North American cultures, nations, and nationalisms.;Winnifred Eaton (Onoto Watanna), the first Asian North American novelist, funneled her foreignness into a series of characters on the margins of society, enriching an American Orientalism that carried with it the seeds of its own deconstruction. She not only revised Japonisme, but she also diversified the genre of Canadian-American writing. Leslie McFarlane was a prolific writer of Canadiana, but as the first writer of the Hardy Boys (as Franklin W. Dixon), an incredibly popular juvenile book series, he discovered that Canadian and popular do not mix, and in his most well-read work, he was forced to abandon his patriotic message. Jack Kerouac made a reputation for himself as the "King of the Beats," a cultish figure in Americana, but as I show, his road to fame emerged from his sense of alienation, as a Franco-American, with the very youth culture he chronicled. Douglas Coupland moves beyond older ideas of nationalism; he finds meaning in the lives of "Generation X," globalized drifters with faith in small, localized communities that transcend the U.S.-Canadian border even as they maintain it. In different ways, these popular authors, I argue, create a transnational culture of rooted cosmopolitanism in an "America" that includes the North.