Through the study of selected works written by Earle Birney, Phyllis Webb, and Leonard Cohen, this thesis seeks to interrogate the wave of modern Canadian nationalism and culture construction that grew as a result of the loosening ties to British roots, the increasing infiltration of American influence, and the political climate following the Second World War. As the Cold War began to take root, Canada found itself amid not only a political conflict, but also a barrage of emerging mass media on a global scale. As a result of this crossfire of national voices, the Canadian culturati made efforts to join in the conversation—through national radio, film, literature, and the creation of a new flag and dictionary—but before the nation could speak, it had to answer the questions that dominated the era: Who is Canada? What is the voice of Canada? Whose voice speaks for the nation? This thesis aims to study the evolution of the answers that were given to these questions. Through the lens of nationalist theory, translation theory, and the postcolonial Gothic, this thesis traces a route from Birney’s attempt to create a nation within a perceived “lack of ghosts,” to Webb’s efforts to question the very question of nationalism, ultimately to Cohen’s illumination of the internal mechanics of national identity as he worked to reconstruct it in a movement toward the Clear Light.

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This thesis observes the various representations of the Amerindian in Quebec literature between 1855 and 1875. Those twenty years are set as a sample both sufficiently rich and narrowly delimited as to permit a synchronic analysis. / The analysis itself is a close inspection of a large quantity of poetry and fiction read in search of pan-textual recurrences. Constant features found as such are presented in a quasi-index of characteristics and quasi-characters-like figures, both seen as cliche, or topoi, and both linked to various imaginary constructs about cruelty, fear and security, forestry, religion, womanhood, alcoholism, etc. The poetics constraints in which those figures take place are considered: for example, what role may or may not play an Amerindian character in a narrative? Also analysed are underlying micro-narratives, particularly those linked to progress and decay. / The whole is not a unified system which would account for every possibility; it may instead be conceptualized as series of trends which may or may not combine or clash. / Those cliches are read as signs of larger and collective questionings, most notably about Quebec's self-image.

This study offers additional nuance to the garden topos and trope within nineteenth- and twentieth-century Canadian women's writing and extends the critical discussion of landscape and the garden as archetype in Canadian literature. This dissertation cross-fertilizes literary analysis with garden theory, using the work of such garden historians as John Dixon Hunt, Mark Francis, and Randolph Hester. The argument emphasizes that gardens in literature, like their actual counterparts, are an art of milieu, reflective of their socio-physical contexts. Both real and textual gardens are rhetorical: their content and formal features invite interpretation. A textual garden performs similarly to an actual garden by providing a spatial frame; a means of naturalization; a vivid exemplar of growth, fertility and beauty; a mediation of the artificial and the natural; a space of paradox; and a site of social performance. / The specific focus of this study is "domestic gardens": gardens that are intimate, immediate to the home, and part of daily life. Chapter one separates the garden from archetypal models by studying the garden as an actual place (specifically, the backwoods kitchen garden) described in the works of Susanna Moodie and Catharine Parr Traill. Chapter two examines how the garden influences Moodie's and Traill's writing of the "transplanted" female emigrant. Chapter three presents the bower as an important precursor to the domestic garden through Gabrielle Roy's Enchantment and Sorrow (1984) and "Garden in the Wind" (1975). Through the bower, Roy mediates the female artist's ambivalence toward home in her pursuit of independence. Chapter four explores Carol Shields' sanctification of the domestic in her fiction through the concept of paradise as both an ideal setting and a mode of being. Chapter five provides a "garden tour" of the poetry of Lorna Crozier, culminating in the garden as a model for the text itself and for the genre of palimpsest. For these writers, literal and figurative gardens are ways of "planting" their characters and personae, "plotting" their narratives, mediating social conventions, and providing an interpretative lens through which readers may perceive the texts as a whole.

This study aims to examine critiques of social injustices expressed through the medium of literature by Native peoples of Canada and Japanese Canadians. My objectives are to explore literary representations of their struggles and examine how these representations and the struggles intersect. My study uses the following: “Coyote and the Enemy Aliens” by Thomas King, My Name is Seepeetza by Shirley Sterling, Obasan by Joy Kogawa, The Kappa Child by Hiromi Goto, Burning Vision by Marie Clements, and “The Uranium Leaking from Port Radium and Rayrock Mines is Killing Us” by Richard Van Camp. The findings reveal Canada’s nation state still rooted in a White settler constructed society, and a legacy of imperialism in the form of globalization that destroys Native peoples’ lands. My thesis concludes with the im/possibilities of reconciliation, also considering my own role as a person of colour, a temporary settler from Japan.

The following Master's thesis is proposing the analysis of five novels, written between 1988 and 1993, by five young Quebec writers. The object of this research is to study the representation of "generation X" in these five texts. The introduction of the thesis establishes the parameters of the "generation X", which comprises people born between 1959 and 1974. This definition constitutes the basis of our comparison between the concept of "generation X" and the main characters of the novels, who are "fictive" members of this generation. / The rest of the thesis includes three chapters, devoted to the following themes: the politic perception of young characters, their economic situation and their attitude toward society. Necessarily, our analysis also considers the difference of perception between "baby-boomers" (people born between 1944 and 1959) and "generation X". This comparison is essential because "generation X" defines itself in opposition with adults values and institutions: reject of political power and authority, reject of work, instruction and money, refusal to integrate society. / The main purpose of this analysis is to see how the present Quebec novel integrates, assimilates and thinks the socio-historic context where it takes place, and how it could possibly renew the forms and the style of Quebec novel in general.

In 1892, in one of his characteristic attacks, Arthur Buies denounced the "deplorable" style of certain young French-Canadian writers of the day. The "jeunes barbares", as he called them, published in small magazines such as Le Recueil litteraire and L'Echo des jeunes, and were strongly influenced by French fin-de-siecle writing (the decadent and Symbolist schools in particular). The creation of the Ecole litteraire de Montreal in 1895 can be seen as a continuation of these varied literary endeavours. Quite aware of the criticisms leveled at young writers by Buies and others, the members of the Ecole viewed their association as both a literary circle and a training ground. The Bulletin du parler francais au Canada , founded in 1902, approached the issue of the poor quality of spoken and written French in French Canada from a more philological angle. It was in the Bulletin... that Camille Roy published his articles on French-Canadian literary history and his famous conference on the nationalisation of French-Canadian literature (in 1904--1905). This text was to have an influence so far-reaching that the Ecole litteraire de Montreal, in its second incarnation, espoused---albeit with some reticence---certain of the "pre-regionalist" values it promoted. The texts published in the Ecole's magazine, Le Terroir (1909), clearly indicate this. / This thesis analyses the diverse modernist and pre-regionalist discourses present from 1889 to 1909, taking into particular account the variations in their antagonism (which manifested itself in a number of short-lived quarrels), with a view to providing a more complete and nuanced picture of the period than previous studies have done; it explores, in the process, the less well-known antecedents to the period which was to follow, a period during which the opposition between the regionalists and the "exotiques" came to a head.

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During the sixties decade, the literature of Quebec is marked by the emergence of the works of women writers who give precedence to the female protagonist. Thus, contrary to her counterpart prior to 1960, the fictitious woman of the sixties is no longer relegated to the background of the novel. This image of the female as a principal character around whom all the elements of the narrative unfold is new to our literature. Our writers seem to desire, consciously or not, to create heroines who are more than mere props for their husbands or their children. Furthermore, these heroines are portrayed as rarely having access to happiness. Indeed, more often than not, they are described as unhappy. Their distress seems to spring from the fact that their family and their milieu persist in defining them, symbolically or concretely, as inferior beings. Their world is a masculine one governed by patriarchal law. Our authors take great care in showing us that it is this law that transforms many of their female characters into figures who tend to submit to the prevalent attitudes and mores of their time. / These heroines lead repetitively dismal and somber lives. From one narrative to the next, the central character expresses feelings of unworthiness, of hatred of self and of others that often culminates in mental instability. Concurrently, certain protagonists are shown to rebel against traditional female roles. In doing so, they illustrate a new kind of character in our literature. One does not find in these works the representation of the following myths: the good mother, the faithful wife, the submissive daughter, the inconsolable widow, the charitable nun. / The new depictions of the female protagonist have a great symbolic value for they show that women authors of the sixties repudiate old models and elaborate an image of the heroine that is absolutely novel to our fiction. Indeed, in recognizing their condition of servitude and in breaking the traditional mould, these characters illustrate a freedom never before accorded to women in our literature. This transformation of the female character as detailed in these works foreshadows the writings authored by Quebecois women in the following decades.

This study aims to examine critiques of social injustices expressed through the medium of literature by Native peoples of Canada and Japanese Canadians. My objectives are to explore literary representations of their struggles and examine how these representations and the struggles intersect. My study uses the following: “Coyote and the Enemy Aliens” by Thomas King, My Name is Seepeetza by Shirley Sterling, Obasan by Joy Kogawa, The Kappa Child by Hiromi Goto, Burning Vision by Marie Clements, and “The Uranium Leaking from Port Radium and Rayrock Mines is Killing Us” by Richard Van Camp. The findings reveal Canada’s nation state still rooted in a White settler constructed society, and a legacy of imperialism in the form of globalization that destroys Native peoples’ lands. My thesis concludes with the im/possibilities of reconciliation, also considering my own role as a person of colour, a temporary settler from Japan.