Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town, by Stephen Leacock (Toronto, New York, London, 1912), is a series of vignettes dramatizing the comedy of day-to-day life in Mariposa, a bustling and big-time small town on the shores of the magnificent Lake Wissanotti. Thrumming with self-importance, endowed with a solemnly quirky populace, Mariposa is modelled on Orillia, Ont; for generations of readers, it has also been the centre of Leacock's fondest and most amusing portrait of small-town life. Leacock's humour depends on his gift for creating a straight-faced storyteller, an earnestly deadpan narrator who cannot imagine what his readers are laughing about. Nowhere is this gift more apparent than in Leacock's warm but gently mocking scrutiny of both the foibles and pretensions of his Mariposan Canadians.
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- MLA 8TH EDITION
- Besner, Neil. "Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town". The Canadian Encyclopedia, 01 August 2014, Historica Canada. www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/sunshine-sketches-of-a-little-town. Accessed 08 October 2024.
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- APA 6TH EDITION
- Besner, N. (2014). Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town. In The Canadian Encyclopedia. Retrieved from https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/sunshine-sketches-of-a-little-town
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- CHICAGO 17TH EDITION
- Besner, Neil. "Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town." The Canadian Encyclopedia. Historica Canada. Article published February 07, 2006; Last Edited August 01, 2014.
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- TURABIAN 8TH EDITION
- The Canadian Encyclopedia, s.v. "Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town," by Neil Besner, Accessed October 08, 2024, https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/sunshine-sketches-of-a-little-town
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Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town
Article by Neil Besner
Published Online February 7, 2006
Last Edited August 1, 2014