Research Information System
16th INTERNATIONAL IDEA CONFERENCE STUDIES IN ENGLISH, Nevşehir, Turkey, 24 - 26 April 2024, pp.131, (Summary Text)
In Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (1912), Canadian author Stephen Leacock creates two
interrelated places, one of which is the fictional small town of Mariposa and the other an
unnamed city where former Mariposans have settled in to live and work. For this reason,
nostalgia prevails in Leacock’s text. Furthermore, throughout the cycle, Mariposa is
characterized by its difference from its others, namely metropolitan cities such as London and
New York. Such comparisons underscore Mariposa’s simplicity and provinciality against the
rapid urbanization and industrialization of the world, revealing not only the town’s detachment
from the nation’s technological and industrial networks, but also its lack of introspection about
its own position. As a result, Leacock presents Mariposa through the ironic perspective of a
narrator, whose ambivalently unattached voice enables the critique of small-town inertia and
ennui as well as the malaise of urbanization. While Mariposa’s temporal gap from the
metropolitan centers and the narrator’s longing for an already bygone Mariposa have drawn
academic interest to the ironic temporality in Sunshine Sketches, this paper stresses and argues
that Leacock’s irony lies in modernism’s uneasy geographies. To clarify, Leacock treats
Mariposa ironically, because modernity has eroded the earlier sense of belonging to a place and
developed a geographically conscious outlook due to the changing national demarcations and
rapid urbanization. Drawing from Jon Hegglund’s concept of “metageographic fiction”, which
emphasizes modern literature’s heightened capacity to defamiliarize space, this paper will
discuss Leacock’s use of irony in Sunshine Sketches as a modernist literary technique for
creating a self-reflexive geography.