“Canada was the Magic Word”: Crossing Borders in Mabel Dunham’s The Trail of the Conestoga

This article considers Mabel Dunham’s 1924 historical romance The Trail of the Conestoga to argue that understanding the nationalizing narratives of exceptionalism demands a close engagement with the specific contexts in which they are invoked. Dunham’s novel turns on the violent construction of the Canadian–US border during the late 18th and early 19th centuries, tracing the migration of American Mennonites to Upper Canada following the American Revolution, and closes after the War of 1812 with their settlement on the contested territory of the Haldimand Tract. The article undertakes a series of overlapping readings of the novel to discuss how the methodological assumptions of contemporary literary studies interact with theological discourses of religious exceptionalism, suggesting the novel offers a complex mapping of the type of religiously inflected, anti-national spatial histories which, while deeply political in context and effect, are routinely obscured by nation-centered perspectives on literature and culture.