2006 – Storm and Dissonance: L.M. Montgomery and Conflict

Storm and Dissonance: L.M. Montgomery and Conflict June 21-25, 2006 at the University of Prince Edward Island, Canada
A collection of essays entitled Storm and Dissonance, edited by Jean Mitchell, was published in 2008.
Conference 2006
Presenter, Dr. Andrea McKenzie, receives instructions from LMMI staff member, Sara McLure (standing), and Conference volunteers Pauline MacPherson (lft) and Nancy Clark (rt).
Dr. Margaret Doody
Dr. Margaret Doody gives Keynote Address and begins the conference.
Book launch for After Green Gables held Friday at the conference.
Book launch for After Green Gables held Friday at the conference.
Some tasty seafood treats at the closing reception.
Some tasty seafood treats at the closing reception.
Dr. Elizabeth Waterston, Dr. Elizabeth Epperly, and Dr. Mary Rubio (lft-rt)
Dr. Elizabeth Waterston, Dr. Elizabeth Epperly, and Dr. Mary Rubio (lft-rt),enjoy the banquet the second last night of the conference.
President Wade McLaughlin (lft) speaks with Earle Lockerby
President Wade McLaughlin (lft) speaks with Earle Lockerby of the L.M. Montgomery Society of Ontario at the reception.
red book cover with a photo of Montgomery standing alone on a rock

Storm and Dissonance: L.M. Montgomery and Conflict: Edited Collection Inspired by the 2006 Conference

Ed. Jean Mitchell. Newcastle, U.K.0
Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008.
From Cambridge Scholars Publishing Catalogue

This collection of essays explores the darker side of L.M. Montgomery’s fiction and life writing.

An international best-selling novelist, Montgomery’s many novels, particularly Anne of Green Gables, have enchanted readers for over a century. However, Montgomery’s own disenchantment made evident with the posthumous publication of her private journals, ruptured the easy conflation of Montgomery as author and person. The tension between public enchantment and private discontent informs Montgomery’s work and life.

By exploring the more transgressive aspects of Montgomery’s writing, these essays provide new insights into the complexity of her work and life. Montgomery’s gentle landscapes and optimistic stories, as the authors suggest, often contain undercurrents of anger, malice, obsession, loss and violence. As one contributor, Margaret Doody, argues “destructiveness plays around the edges of all of her fiction.”

Essays [also] explore the anguish of mother loss, her ambivalent depictions of the maternal, the experiences War and the Great Depression as well as a range of issues related to gender, class, nature and social and cultural change. Attention to the dissonance and conflict as these essays demonstrates, provides compelling and new space for theoretical readings of Montgomery’s work.