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Paul Kane’s Wanderings of an Artist and the Rise of Transcontinental Nationalism

January 29, 2015

By I.S. MacLaren
Abstract:

This essay provides the historical contexts of two events: artist Paul Kane's travels in the 1840s, and the publication of Wanderings of an Artist at the end of the 1850s. It then offers an interpretation of the book's anti- and non-USAmerican dimensions before discussing the subsequent production of the image of Kane as solely a Canadian-born figure with no USAmerican connections, and a hero for Canadian expansionists by virtue of his having captured Native lifeways and people in the years before they "vanished" to make way for the emerging dominion.

Art British Canadian Studies History Nationalism Native Studies Nineteenth Century Travel Writing
This article “Paul Kane’s Wanderings of an Artist and the Rise of Transcontinental Nationalism” originally appeared in New Work on Early Canadian Literature. Spec. issue of Canadian Literature 213 (Summer 2012): 16-38.

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