As For Me and Me Arse: Strategic Regionalism and the Home Place in Lynn Coady's Strange Heaven

McKay's influential study chronicles the formation of a powerful cultural paradigm in which Nova Scotians are constructed as a hardy, simple, innocent people, close to the land and unravaged by modernity: They lived, generally, in fishing and farming communities, supposedly far removed from capitalist social relations and the stresses of modernity. The Folk did not work in factories, coal mines, lobster canneries, or domestic service: they were rooted to the soil and to the rockbound coast, and lived lives of self-sufficiency close to nature (26).