Hearne, Samuel | Keith Harrison (essay date September-December 1995)
Keith Harrison (essay date September-December 1995)
SOURCE: Harrison, Keith. “Samuel Hearne, Matonabbee, and the ‘Esquimaux Girl’: Cultural Subjects, Cultural Objects.” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature 22, nos. 3-4 (September-December 1995): 647-57.
[In the following essay, Harrison analyzes Hearne's changing portrayals of identity and self in Journey to the Northern Ocean.]
The heroizing implicit in the trope of exploration is downplayed, even subverted in Samuel Hearne's A Journey from Prince of Wales's Fort in Hudson's Bay to the Northern Ocean …, a sometimes boring narrative tinged with farce and shaped by anti-climax which often represents the narrator as passive. As Bruce Greenfield observes, “Exploration conventionally connoted independence and aggressiveness, the knowledge-gathering process as preparation for outright conquest … [but] Hearne's narrative, in contrast, is full of situations in...
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