Northern Love

In Northern Love, Paul Nonnekes proposes a conception of love suggestive of a distinctive model of Canadian masculinity. He pursues debates in psychoanalysis and cultural theory in relation to two representative male characters in novels by Rudy Wiebe (A Discovery of Strangers) and Robert Kroetsch (The Man from the Creeks). Ranging from debates on the Hegelian master-slave dialectic to the Lacanian Name of the Father, and from Butler's strange gender to Zizek's subjective awareness of lack, Nonnekes probes the two novels and their main characters, eliciting an evolving conception of love characteristic of the Canadian cultural imaginary.