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Articles

Volume 33, Number 2 (2008)

The Crest of the Wave: Reading the Success Story of Bestsellers

Submitted
March 31, 2009
Published
2008-06-06

Abstract

The success stories of Ann-Marie MacDonald's Fall on Your Knees (1996), Alistair MacLeod's No Great Mischief (1999), and Wayne Johnston's The Colony of Unrequited Dreams (1998) offer insight into why fiction about Atlantic Canada has become "hot" in the past decade. An examination of the production and reception of these novels, in the light of Pierre Bourdieu's conception of cultural and symbolic capital, reveals the cultural politics and political economy of publishing, the consecration of literary value, and the ideological function of representations of the Atlantic region.