Content area
Full Text
Irene Gammel and Benjamin LeFebvre, eds. Anne's World: A New Century of Anne of Green Gables. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010. 263 pp. $29.95.
"Anne's World," a link on the web site www.foreveranne.com, invites the prospective tourist "to discover the beauty and magic of the real Prince Edward Island." The eleven essays in Irene Gammel and Benjamin Lefebvre's Anne's World: A New Century of Anne of Green Gables explore the ideas of extension and "faux reality" to interrogate the assumption that any world has exclusive ownership over Anne Shirley or that any of Anne's worlds can aver to be "real."
It has long been recognized that Anne's world reaches well beyond the Cavendish farmhouse where L. M. Montgomery penned the first of her series of nine books featuring the precocious redhead around whom an industry of books, film and stage adaptations, tourist sites and memorabilia, websites, and discussion and research groups has developed. To date, much attention has been given to tracing the paths that led to the creation of Anne and her world. In Looking for Anne: How Lucy Maud Montgomery Dreamed Up a Literary Classic (2008), for example, Gammel demonstrates that even before Montgomery submitted her manuscript to Boston's L. C. Page in April 1907, the boundaries of Anne's world stretched outside her Cavendish roots to encompass the images and stories from books and magazines that Montgomery had absorbed. Anne's World, which the 2008 one hundredth anniversary of the publication of Anne of Green Gables inspired, extends old and blazes new paths, backwards and forward from 1908, inward and outward from Cavendish. Unlike other media forms celebrating this anniversary-exhibitions, articles and books, prequels and sequels-this anthology is the most self-consciously reflective of our twenty-first-century world that, in her introduction, "Reconsidering Anne's World," Gammel describes as "flowing, disjunctive, and migratory" (7) and in which Anne, "an über-connector" (3), "a polymorphous figure" (10), is still at home.
The dual purposes of Anne's World, as articulated in Gammel's introduction, are amply realized. The first purpose is that of other publications inspired by the 2008 anniversary, such as Holly Blackford's 100 Years of Anne with an "e" (2009): to consolidate previous scholarship and suggest how it might be extended. Anne's World achieves this goal primarily through...