The quest of the folk : antimodernism and cultural selection in twentieth-century Nova Scotia /

In this well-written, thoughtful, and important study, McKay reviews the history of "folk" studies, with its "noble savage" myths of simplicity and innocence, its battles between scholars of the right and left--who appropriated with equal enthusiasm the music, craft, and lore of the "folk." Readers rediscover W. Roy Mackenzie, whose work was eclipsed by others, including the controversial Helen Creighton, whose problematic legacy receives respectful but critical treatment. Although the section on Mary Black and the handicrafts movement is important and interesting, it lacks the weight or passion of the review of Creighton and the folklore movement. Along with a genealogy of Canadian folklorists, their rivalries and dialogues (e.g., Creighton and Edith Fowke), McKay provides a portrait of the marketing of Nova Scotia and the "folk essentialism" that permeates promotional materials and the (related) Creighton opus. The theoretical framework is a neo-Gramscian fusion of Marxian political economy and Foucauldian genealogy, applied with sufficient flexibility to encompass the range of sometimes contradictory observations. Upper-division undergraduates and above. V. Alia; University of Western Ontario