Stereotypography

This shift was also influenced by technological, economic, and cultural developments, including the invention of stereotypography and the mechanization of printing, the growth of the reading public, and the shift from romanticism to realism as the dominant attitude among authors.

It depended on all manner of new technologies that moved beyond mere mechanics into the sphere of automation: the science of statistics (the quantification and mapping of "spiritual destitution" for the purposes of extending the "system to every portion of the land"); stereotypography (the ability to copy and store plates for subsequent print runs), steam-powered presses, and the Fourdrinier papermaking machine.

For Jodi Lundgren, on the other hand, Mosionier's treatment of identity partakes of a cultural syncretism characteristic of postcolonialism; for Dawn Thompson, it posits an ethnic countermemory that resists and revises the official discourse of Canadian multiculturalism; for Margery Fee, it provides the novel's dual protagonists, April and Cheryl, with a strategy to endure and combat racism ("Deploying"); and for Dee Horne, it functions to create a template on which the author "maps the stereotypography of colonial discourse" (72).