Dominic Hardy – författare

Canadian readers have enjoyed their own graphic satire since colonial times and Canadian artists have thrived as they took aim at the central issues and figures of their age. Graphic satire, a combination of humorous drawing and text that usually involves caricature, is a way of taking an ethical stand about contemporary politics and society. First appearing in short-lived illustrated weeklies in Montreal, Quebec City, and Toronto in the 1840s, usually as unsigned copies of engravings from European magazines, the genre spread quickly as skilled local illustrators, engravers, painters, and sculptors joined the teams of publishers and writers who sought to shape public opinion and public policy. A detailed account of Canadian graphic satire, Sketches from an Unquiet Country looks at a century bookended by the aftermath of the 1837–38 Rebellions and Canada’s entry into the Second World War. As fully fledged artist-commentators, Canadian cartoonists were sometimes gently ironic, but they were just as often caustic and violent in the pursuit of a point of view. This volume shows a country where conflicts crop up between linguistic and religious communities, a country often resistant to social and political change for women and open to the cross-currents of anti-Semitism, xenophobia, and fascism that flared across Europe and North America in the early twentieth century. Drawing on new scholarship by researchers working in art history, material culture, and communication studies, Sketches from an Unquiet Country follows the fortunes of some of the artists and satiric themes that were prevalent in the centres of Canadian publishing.

Justin has always been conflicted over the exalted claims made about The Wicker Man, his father’s magnum opus: for him, the film destroyed his family. He has no photographs of Robin Hardy in his house. His brother Dominic, whom Robin abandoned as a baby, has been more distanced. Their father’s film is a set of fragmented stories: benighted production, brutal editing, critical reception, financial failure, and later revival.Then, at the height of the Covid pandemic, Justin receives a letter from a woman he’s never met. She has found a cache of Robin’s personal papers that have been sitting untouched in the attic of Justin’s childhood home since the 1970s. Would he like them?Using these newly uncovered sources, along with the Hardy family’s own letters and photographs, Children of The Wicker Man investigates what Robin Hardy’s creative contribution to The Wicker Man was, and considers who was truly sacrificed. In the process, the brothers discover an unlikely heroine: Justin’s mother Caroline, who bankrupted herself paying loans to her husband and the film, only for him to leave when it flopped. For all women behind artist husbands, this book reveals a series of heroines: the mothers of the children of The Wicker Man.