"Canadian Classic" and "Commodity Export": The Nationalism of "Our" Anne of Green Gables

L.M. Montgomery's 1908 novel Anne of Green Gables is one of the most popular English-Canadian novels ever. It should not be surprising, then, that over the past two decades its heroine, Anne Shirley, has been elevated to the status of a “national icon.” But Anne is also a major “commodity export” that circulates and is fundamentally transformed in a range of extra-national contexts: “Our Anne” becomes another kind of cultural property in other contexts where “she” takes on a national specificity that is not “Canadian.” This article situates Anne's iconic value in English Canada in relation to the ideas of nationalism that should be seen to underpin Anne's narrative, and discusses the novel's putative “Canadianness” in relation to its longstanding global circulation.