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Graduate Students

Robertson, B. - M.A

Reaching Anti-Maudernism: Investigations into the Memory of L.M. Montgomery - Dr. Alan Gordon, advisor

         This thesis is an investigation of Lucy Maud Montgomery and the manner in which she employed an antimodern framework of memory to act as a therapeutic escape from the pressures of modernity. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Western society attempted to cope with rampant industrial and technological change by clinging to antimodern, idealized visions of the past. Montgomery increasingly used this strategy to deal with modern anxieties by idealizing and memorializing reflections of her childhood in rural Prince Edward Island. Her journals provide a lens through which this development can be seen, which she later prepared for future publication to provide the shared memory of her time with a memorial of the antimodern paradise of her past that she had formed in her mid. In the same way, Montgomery's novels and photography were another means by which she memorialized the past to deal with modern existence.