Flight to Canada (Magill’s Survey of American Literature, Revised Edition)
At a glance:
- Author: Ishmael Reed
- First Published: 1976
- Type of Work: Novel
- Genres: Long fiction, Satire
- Subjects: United States or Americans, Authors or writers, Escapes, Nineteenth century, Slavery or slaves, Civil War, Wit or humor, Assassination, Canada or Canadians, Faustian bargains, Symbolism
- Locales: United States, Canada
Although Flight to Canada is Reed's Civil War novel, all ages of American history are squeezed into this satire. As in all Reed's novels, time is fluid. It opens with Reed's poem “Flight to Canada,” followed by a present-day reflection on the ways in which Josiah Henson's escaped slave narrative and Harriet Beecher Stowe's more celebrated version of it helped create the history of the war.
Thus, the time-consciousness of this novel is always double, referring to the events, real and fictitious, of the 1860's and the 1970's simultaneously. Deliberate anachronisms are...
[The entire page is 1660 words long]
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