SOURCE: Keefer, Janice Kulyk. “Politics and Fictions.” In Under Eastern Eyes: A Critical Reading of Maritime Fiction, pp. 123-59. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987.

In the following excerpt, Keefer places A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder within the context of Canadian Maritime fiction, focusing on the narrative as an “unutopia” that questions the value of idealistic spiritual and political philosophies.

The chequered nature of Maritime political sensibility, with its interweaving of radical (or at least progressive) and conservative philosophies has led to the development of a literary tradition in which one finds radical conservatives like Haliburton cheek by jowl with moderate liberals like Howe, and such idiosyncratically opposed world views as those maintained by Milton Acorn and Alden Nowlan.¹ The fiction the Maritimes has produced reflects this chequering in the mixed genres it favours; thus we have works like Rockbound, whose grindingly realistic portrayal of the...