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The L.M. Montgomery Institute of U.P.E.I.
Welcome to the online home of the L.M. Montgomery Institute of UPEI. We hope that you find your visit to our pages both interesting and educational. We have done our best to include as much information about our programs, conferences, projects, and, of course, L.M. Montgomery and her life and works as possible but we certainly don't have everything! (At least, we don't have it all here yet!).
L.M. Montgomery achieved international fame in her lifetime, putting Prince Edward Island and Canada on the world literary map. A prolific writer, she published some 500 short stories and poems and twenty novels. Nineteen of the novels were set on Prince Edward Island, even though she lived in Ontario for the last thirty-one years of her life.
Today, Montgomery's novels, journals, letters, short stories, and poems are read and studied by general readers and scholars from around the world. Her writing appeals to people who love beauty and to those who struggle against oppression. In the Second World War, Polish soldiers were issued copies of Montgomery's novels to take to the front. A post-war Japan turned to Anne for lessons in optimism and imagination. A musical based on Montgomery's first best-seller, Anne of Green Gables, has drawn packed houses for over twenty-five years. Recent television movies and series based on her novels have had international success and have made Montgomery's name - again - a household word.
News from the LMMI
2010 L.M. Montgomery Conference
Welcome to the home of the 2010 L.M. Montgomery conference, “L.M. Montgomery and the Matter of Nature." Presented by the L.M. Montgomery Institute of UPEI, the conference will be running from June 23rd to 27th, 2010 at the University of Prince Edward Island, Charlottetown.
In 2010 we invite you to consider L.M. Montgomery and the matter of nature. While multiple romanticisms have informed L.M. Montgomery’s passionate views of nature her descriptions were complex as she wrote both of and for nature. What are the effects of the representations and images of nature that are crafted and circulated in the fiction of Montgomery, and in that of other writers of literature (especially for children and youth)? How do her narrations of nature shape children and adults within and across cultures? How do particular constructions of nature work in fiction, across such differences as gender, race, culture and class? What are the cultural and historical contingencies surrounding nature in Montgomery's work?
In recent years, the matter of "nature" itself has been the subject of much contested debate and theoretical innovation across disciplines. Nature situates binary relationships that are often represented as hierarchical and oppositional. These include nature and culture; child and adult; animal and human; male and female; reason and emotion; mind and body; modern and traditional; raw and cooked; domestic and wild; urban and rural ─ among others. How might any of these formulations be examined and challenged (or not) in the context of Montgomery's work? What does it mean to consider Montgomery as a "green" writer (Doody) or as a proto-ecofeminist (Holmes)? What do Montgomery’s provocative readings of nature offer us at a time of environmental crises and ecological preoccupations?
Please feel free to contact us if you have questions - E-mail: lmminst@upei.ca
