Introduction: Disturbing Images -- The Poor in the National Imaginary -- The Power of Images -- Poverty Narratives: A New Category of Analysis -- The Gender of Poverty -- Fictioning' a Literature -- Beyond Literature: Ordinary Voices -- Populist Motives -- Cultural Critique as Social Therapy -- Testimony and Radical Knowledge -- Visits and Homecomings -- Susanna Moodie: Poverty and Vice -- Nellie McClung: Social Gospel Rescue -- Gabrielle Roy: Everyday Struggle as Resistance -- 'We Live in a Rickety House': Social Boundaries and Poor Housing -- A Genealogy of Poor Houses -- Alice Munro's Gaze -- from a Distance -- Homeplace and 'Bugs' -- Theories and Anti-Theory: On Knowing Poor Women -- Anti-Theory, Anti-What? -- Subjectivities -- Theories of the Classed and Gendered Subject -- Understanding as Opposed to Mapping Subjectivities -- Subverting 'Poor Me': Negative Constructions of Identity -- Cy-Thea Sand's Cultural Smuggling -- Maria Campbell's Halfbreed and Alternative Status-Honour Groups -- The Poor as Colonized Subjects -- Decolonizing Poor Subjects through Autobiography -- 'Organized Forgetting' -- On Autobiographical Memories of Poverty, Class, Gender, and Nation -- Poverty as Distant Landscape: Edna Jaques -- Class Travelling with Fredelle Bruser Maynard -- 'Remnants of Nation' -- Poverty and Nation as Reciprocal Constructions -- Saving the Nation: The Diviners -- Strategies of Containment and Exclusion -- Counter-national Testimonies -- The Long View: Contexts of Oppositional Criticism
Summary
Treating poverty not simply as a theme in literature but as a force that in fact shapes the texts themselves, Rimstead adopts the notion of a common culture to include ordinary voices in national culture, in this case the national culture of Canada