Long-distance Landing: Emma Donoghue and her Experience of Otherness in Canada

Abstract

Emma Donoghue has been on the literary scene since 1993 when she published her first novel Stir – Fry, a coming of age novel and, at the same time, a crude and unwelcome quest towards discovering one’s identity. An author of five more novels, other pieces of fiction, as well as a PhD in English from Cambridge University, comes back with her much biographical novel Landing published in 2007. Landing is one in a line of Emma Donoghue’s novels that renders the reader every possible cliché about strangeness and otherness ferociously authentic. In her Landing Emma Donoghue captures what can be called a clash of identities in the un-reality of timelessness — here erratic travel in the jet lagged era — where an apparent homelessness and strangeness are irrevocably written into both national and personal histories. Since the stories of attracting opposites have been exhausted in literature, Donoghue manages to make her story absorbing by taking the ambiguous nature of selfhood into the stereotyped context of Canadian and Irish histories and well beyond into the pots of personal narrative of youth, adulthood, ethnicity and gender. In the paper, we will have an opportunity to look at the (de)construction of personal and foreign narratives, histories of selfhood and otherness within hostile environments of public and private Canada and Ireland.