Fashioning the Canadian Landscape: Essays on Travel Writing, Tourism, and National Identity in the Pre-Automobile Era

"...Little’s essays suggest that nineteenth-century tourism provides a significant vantage point for understanding the interplay of different discourses and performances of ‘nation’ that occurred within the Dominion’s borders."

Cecilia Morgan, University of Toronto, Histoire Sociale/Social History, vol 52 no 105, May '19

"Why visit Canada but for its awe-inspiring natural spaces and picturesque villages? J.I. Little’s collection of essays details how travel writers from Britain, the United States, and Canada situated landscape at the center of Canadian identity and Canada’s purpose in the world. A collection of eight revised and two new essays carry the reader over 150 years and across what has become Canada, revealing ways in which writers connected identity to colonial landscape transformation."

Rebecca Mancuso, American Review of Canadian Studies

"Little’s contribution comes from looking deeply at how a wide variety of landscapes in the provinces that are now Canada have been fashioned. The deep study of specific landscapes makes this collection a rewarding read."

Eleanor Bird, Lancaster University, British Journal of Canadian Studies

"J.I. Little is at the top of his game, confident and comfortable with his chosen topic, mining every primary document and consulting every secondary source. Little's ability to draw on the relevant theory, including the sublime, the picturesque, the romantic, the gothic, the modern, the colonial gaze, the male gaze, erasure, and the imaginary Indian, is especially impressive. Yet he never lets theory intrude and he never loses his reader in jargon. Fashioning Canada’s Colonial and National the Canadian Landscapes is readable from beginning to end and has left me thinking about how Canada's landscapes have been fashioned and re-fashioned in the past, and how they might be fashioned and re-fashioned in the future."

Donald Wright, University of New Brunswick