Vancouver Stories: Nancy Lee and Alice Munro

Abstract

The British Columbian city of Vancouver, on Canada’s Pacific coast, is regarded by some as an archetypal postmodern metropolis. In his introduction to Vancouver: Representing the Postmodern City (1994), Paul Delany interrogates what is already a presumption of its place as a ‘vanguard city of postmodernism’ (23). City of Glass (2000), Douglas Coupland’s quixotic travel guide/memoir, characterizes his home town as a vibrant, idiosyncratic young city, where East and West meet: ‘in a poetic way, it feels as if human history, which began in Asia and moved ever westward across the centuries, is now making the final connection by hooking up western North America with Asia’ (26). Although the cyberpunk author William Gibson has situated very little of his fiction in an explicitly Vancouver setting, his hi-tech cityscapes, with their networks of disparate communities, may also be read in the context of fusion culture in the place where he has lived for 40 years. This chapter examines female encounters with postcolonial Vancouver which subvert or problematize that version of the ultra-modern global city, seen in Coupland, Gibson and other male writers such as Timothy L. Taylor.