Przestrzeń i jej funkcje w Rzece Złodziei Michaela Crummeya

Abstract

The fiction of Michael Crummey, one of the renowned contemporary Canadian writers, is deeply rooted in the landscape of his home-island, that is, Newfoundland. In his debut novel River Thieves published in 2001, the author shows the land as a non-anthropological determinant of human history and the only witness to keep a vivid, undistorted memory of the vanished tribe of Beothuks. This article invites the reading of Crummey’s works through the prism of geopoetics and cultural geography. It shows what functions the space/land plays in the discussed narrative and how it adds new meanings to an old story, that is the extinction of Red Indians. Endowed with agency, nature is as important an agent in history-making as the settlers and first inhabitants; moreover, at present day it acts a live repository of memory. The article also investigates the differences between the English and Polish editions of the novel, focusing on the maps that precede the narrative.