Part of
Language in Place: Stylistic perspectives on landscape, place and environmentEdited by Daniela Francesca Virdis, Elisabetta Zurru and Ernestine Lahey
[Linguistic Approaches to Literature 37] 2021
► pp. 45–64
This chapter provides a Text World Theory analysis of two poems by the Canadian poet Alden Nowlan, specifically focusing on the “death by landscape” trope (Atwood 1972) in these works. I argue that Nowlan, often viewed as a regionalist poet, draws on a wilderness-based model of Canadian identity that clearly aligns his work with deeply-felt national concerns. The analysis provided here extends earlier considerations of text-world landscape construction in poetry (e.g. Lahey 2006), thus contributing to the development of a Text World Theory that is more sensitive to literary landscape representation.