| Summary: | With its one hundred years of continuous publication, its translations into numerous languages, its worldwide readers, and the scholarly engagement that continues to surround it, Anne of Green Gables epitomizes the status of classic. Such popularity, in both Western and non-Western cultures, raises questions about the appeal of a text in which embedded constructions of home, nationality, childhood, and land continue to exclude readers from diasporic identities, such as First Nations peoples. Anne of Green Gables and the literary critical tradition that surrounds it have embodied ideas and processes of identity formation constructed from European and Euro-American colonizers. This paper will discuss how the idea of the children's classic has been built on possessing stolen land to construct an identity of national belonging, place, and history that excludes colonized subjectivities. My purpose is to dismantle the ways in which Anne of Green Gables is bound by and reinscribes colonizing discourses - not only in historical context but for today's readers - and, in doing so, to attempt to make these discourses visible.
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