Among the Fisherfolk: J.F.B. Livesay and the Invention of Peggy’s Cove

J.F.B. Livesay’s Peggy’s Cove is a Canadian landmark within an uncelebrated genre, travel writing. An ode to the contented lifestyles of rugged Nova Scotia fisherfolk, Livesay’s book is not only important as a literary work. This essay argues that it also illustrated the thorough rejection of nineteenth-century ways of seeing the province’s society and landscape, and that it foreshadows the postwar mass tourism that would transform Peggy’s Cove …