In Be Good, Sweet Maid: The Trials of Dorothy Joudrie (1999), Audrey Andrews recounts the life and trial of Dorothy Joudrie, a so-called wealthy socialite who was arrested in Calgary in 1995 for attempting to murder her estranged husband after decades of domestic abuse. Andrews tells Joudrie’s story in the form of a semi-auto/biographical text that quotes other scholarly and creative literary works in an intertextual dialogue about violence against women, post-World War II gender socialization, and the “battered women syndrome” defence. This thesis takes this highly referential dialogue as its starting point, and then extends Andrews’ cultural work by tracing a genealogy of colonialism in Canadian domestic violence laws with the help of selected intertexts – including Yvonne Johnson’s Stolen Life: Journey of a Cree Woman (1998), the trial of Angelique Lavallee, and Lorena Bobbitt’s infamous case. First, I source the epigraphs that Andrews strategically places at the start of each chapter and discern the layer of meaning that these external texts bring to Joudrie’s story in order to raise questions about how Andrews rearticulates the work of others and the politics of such a rearticulation. Second, I similarly frame Joudrie’s 1995 trial as a referential and intertextual discourse based in precedent established by the Supreme Court in 1990 when it ruled that expert testimony on the “battered woman syndrome” was admissible in the R. v. Lavallee case (Shaffer 1). This allows me to consider a consequence of the ruling often overlooked in feminist literature: due to the fact that the original defendant, Angelique Lavallee, was a Métis woman whose identity was erased in the courtroom and in case law, subsequent trials employing the “battered woman syndrome” defence repeat settler relations entrenched in colonial violence. Third, I expose how representations can fail by thinking through what Stephen Couser calls the auto/bio/ethics of life writing, which reveals the limits of Canadian laws and literatures. Ultimately, this discussion generates questions about who is considered human under the law and how life writing might re-imagine the “reasonable” human in more just and compassionate ways. / Thesis (Master, Gender Studies) -- Queen's University, 2012-07-28 10:28:24.988

This thesis examines the use of the pastoral form in recent Canadian literature. As the pastoral constitutes a literary site where a concern for landscape converges with a search for community, it has been employed as a myth in nationalist discourses whose functioning depend heavily on symbolized landscapes and idealized social types. The philosophical basis of the pastoral is the classical opposition between nature and culture. For this reason, its representations are often coded as 'natural'. To this extent, the pastoral participates in a hegemonic myth-making system, constituting a limited semiotic field in which certain representations are privileged while others are negated. Following Marx and Barthes, the thesis contends that an attack the nature/culture opposition is essential to undermining the hegemony of the myth-making process. In the context of nationalism, a pastoral can articulate a critique of dominant a 'naturalized' representations when it questions its own use of the nature/culture opposition.

In early criticism of Western Canadian literature, prairie spaces were constructed as predominantly rural in order to set the region and prairie writing apart from the rest of Canada and other Canadian literature. In time, prairie criticism’s focus on rural realist texts led to the marginalization of urban prairie writing and the construction of urban spaces as corrupt and artificial in comparison to the natural and virtuous rural environment. I work to remedy the absence of urban texts in the criticism of prairie literature, and I argue that prairie cities are dynamic and mobile worlds where prairie inhabitants exercise their agency through everyday practices. Utilizing the work of Raymond Williams, I show how urban and rural spaces are constructed in the canonical prairie texts of Grove, Ostenso, and Stead to serve various capitalist interests and colonial ideologies. I explore the depiction of Winnipeg in Durkin’s The Magpie as a dynamic, complex, and politically engaged space. Moreover, I use Michel de Certeau’s work to assert that the underprivileged and colonized individuals in the city subvert and utilize the systems and organizations of those in power. They develop an increased deviousness and take advantage of incidental and multifarious opportunities that come their way as they work, dwell, and move about in everyday life. Subsequently, I look at urban writing by women, Eastern-European immigrants, and Aboriginal writers and show that they use urban spaces, everyday practices, and writing to exercise their agency. To destabilize unitary forces in language, to depict their own experiences, and to convey their own meanings of home, labour, and community, marginalized writers employ wordplay, humour, historical and cultural references, and intertextuality. I also use Jane M. Jacobs’ work on postcolonial cities and Tim Cresswell’s theories of mobility. I read prairie cities as places of competing mobilities and networks of dominances and resistances, where colonized individuals negotiate complex, hybrid, and authentic identities. The urban prairie texts I explore demonstrate the possibility of political, social, and economic changes, and a beneficial relationship with the prairie environment.

This thesis explores the issues of representation and identity through an examination of the writings of Thomas King and Mudrooroo. The particular focus of the dissertation is on the similar yet distinctive ways these authors explore past and present possibilities for representing Indigenous peoples in fiction. This discussion has a largely Canadian-Australian cross-cultural comparison because of the national milieux in which each author writes. The research question, then, addresses the authors' common approaches to Indigenous, colonial and postcolonial themes and the similar textual attitudes to the act of representation of identity in writing. In order to explore these ideas the chapters in the thesis do not each focus on a particular author or even on a specific text. Each chapter examines the writings of both authors comparatively, and reads the novels of both Thomas King and Mudrooroo thematically. The themes unifying each chapter occur in four major movements. Firstly, the Preface and Chapter One are primarily concerned with the methodology of the thesis. This methodology can be summarised as a combination of general postcolonial assumptions about the impact of colonial texts on representations of Indigenous peoples; ideas of reading practice coming from North American and Australian Indigenous writing communities and cultural studies theories on race. A movement in argument then occurs in Chapters Two and Three, which focus upon how the authors interact with colonising narratives from the past. Chapter Four shifts from this focus on past images and explores how the authors commonly re-imagine the present. In Chapters Five and Six the dissertation progresses from charting the authors' common responses to colonising narratives -- past and present -- and engages in the writings in terms of the authors' explications of Indigenous themes and their celebrations of Indigenous presence. These chapters analyse the ways in which King and Mudrooroo similarly re-envisage narrative process, time and space. Overall, the thesis is not interested in authorisations of Thomas King and Mudrooroo as 'Indigenous writers'. Rather, it argues that these authors on either side of the world use very similar techniques to reject previous representations of Indigenous people, and, importantly, attempt to change the meaning of and approach to representation. In so doing this thesis finds that the novels of both authors respond to colonising semiotic fields, as well as reducing the importance of such fields by incorporating them within a larger framework of repeated and multiple evocations of Indigenous identity. The writings of both Thomas King and Mudrooroo share a selfconscious textuality. The same tales and emblems are repeated within each author's entire oeuvre in order to reinforce their thematic trope of re-presentation as a constantly evolving process. Finally, the thesis concludes that a significant common effect of this similar approach to re-presentation is an emphasis on the community over the individual, and a community that can be best described as pan-Indigenous rather than specific.

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Thèse (M.E.L.) -- Université du Québec à Chicoutimi, 2004. / Bibliogr.: f. [92]-93. Document électronique également accessible en format PDF. CaQCU

Thesis (M.A.)--Acadia University, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 129-135). Also available on the Internet via the World Wide Web.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Alberta, 2010. / Title from pdf file main screen (viewed on April 29, 2010). A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English Department of English and Film Studies, University of Alberta. Includes bibliographical references.

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