Quiet in the Land: A Novel
Date
2024-09-26
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
ORCID
Type
Thesis
Degree Level
Masters
Abstract
Mennonite fiction is experiencing a renaissance as a new generation of writers and scholars emerge onto the Canadian literary landscape. Authors like Miriam Toews, David Bergen, Rudy Wiebe, and Sandra Birdsell, have established a strong bedrock of Mennonite literature, from which a wellspring of fiction-writing about this specific ethno-religious identity is growing amongst a younger group of writers.
A Millennial Mennonite writer myself, my novel-thesis, Quiet in the Land, is a contemporary Mennonite Kunstlerroman that explores the lives of three generations of Mennonite women artists living on the Canadian prairies. Through the lives of my fictional characters, I paint a picture of what critic and scholar Magdalene Redekop refers to as the “porous boundaries” of urban and rural Mennonite communities in Manitoba.
The question that guided the writing of Quiet in the Land is how Mennonite women across generations imagine and reimagine their identities as artists and/or mothers within Mennonite mythologies of place. The novel spans a reasonable length of time from the 1970’s to present day and features a range of women characters living and working in artistic, domestic, and agricultural contexts. Through a fictional lens, my literary project resists nostalgic tropes and instead focusses on how creative practices produce generative, enlivening spaces within the lives of Mennonite women who choose to make their home on the Western prairies.
Description
Keywords
Kunstlerroman, Mennonite
Citation
Degree
Master of Fine Arts (M.F.A.)
Department
English
Program
Writing