SOURCE: Kertzer, Jonathan. “The Nation as Monster.” In Worrying the Nation: Imagining a National Literature in English Canada, pp. 117-59. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998.

In the following excerpt, Kertzer discusses the problem of Canadian national identity and historical consciousness, referring to Marlatt's feminist revision of postcolonial Canadian history in Ana Historic as a case study.

Michelet's work also presents, however … an alternate vision of the Other, one that expresses both the urgency of the historian's desire to justify and sanctify the historical process and his fear that it may not be possible to do so, that there may be no way to subsume the discontinuous and incomparable individual manifestations of ‘life’ in a continuous and intelligible pattern—in a word, that history does not make sense.

Lionel Gossman, Between History and Literature

Romantic historiography sets itself the contradictory task of recapturing the past while maintaining its remote...