This thesis examines a number of Canadian Captivity and Exploration journals dating from Radisson's account of his captivity in 1652 to the investigation of the West Coast by the naturalist David Douglas in 1826. The examination attempts to reveal these early journal writers not only as men undertaking a specific physical task, but as authors reflecting the spirit of their enterprise in their journals. The genre of the travel journal reflects the literary spirit of the age in which they were written; sometimes allied to it, and at times quite antithetical to it. Each journal exposes an individual, uniquely aware of his position in time and place, attempting to express a novel experience in terms familiar to himself and his readers. The result is not always satisfying from a literary point of view, but then the criterion of the thesis has not been stylistically based,but has been primarily interested in revealing the individual in his particular endeavour. The results are not consistent nor conclusive, but the examination of the journal, which is the lasting testimony of physical trial, uncovers a fresh literary genre which is usually investigated only by the historian or the geographer. The thesis is divided into two primary sections: chapter two, which deals with the Captivity journals of John Tanner, Alexander Henry, John Jewitt and Pierre Radisson; and chapter three which investigates the Exploration journals of Radisson, Henry Kelsey, William Cormack, David Douglas, Alexander Mackenzie, David Thompson and Samuel Hearne. The introductory chapter gives some background to the genre of the travel journal from the period of Richard Hakluyt to the esoteric world of Science Fiction. The nature of heroic endeavour and the position of the travel journal as source material for authors is also briefly discussed. In handling a subject which refuses to be limited to any one discipline, nothing conclusive can be stated. However, it seems important to isolate the travel journal in its attempt to describe the human condition. The environment and terms are not usually associated with literature, and yet the genre manages, unexpectedly, to point up those universal themes so essential to all creative writing. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

Whereas the relationship between real autobiography and its fictional forms has been studied at length, the equivalent relationship for diaries has barely been acknowledged, let alone explored. This thesis follows the history of diary-writing – as a field that includes real and fictional diaries and the complex relations between them – in twentieth-century French writing. I take as my starting point the moment in the 1880s when, following a series of successful posthumous diary publications, a new generation of writers became aware that their own journaux intimes would probably come to be published, with considerable consequences for the way their literary œuvre and their very persona as an author (or their textual author-figure) would appear to readers. Of this generation, André Gide exerted by far the greatest influence over the course of diary-writing, and four works in particular experiment, in extremely diverse forms, with the literary possibilities of the diary: Les Cahiers d'André Walter (1891), Paludes (1895), Le Journal des faux-monnayeurs (1926), and his Journal 1889–1939 (1939). After the Second World War, diary-writing continued to draw on forms established by Gide, but now inflected by radical changes in attitudes towards the writing subject: Raymond Queneau's works published under the pseudonym of Sally Mara (1947–62) cast light on attitudes towards the diary at the time of a theoretical exclusion of the writing subject; Roland Barthes experimented with diaries at the point of a return of the writing subject (1977–79); and Annie Ernaux's published diaries between 1993 and 2011 demonstrate the role of diary-writing within the modern field of life-writing. Rather than making a gradual progress towards literary recognition, this history of diary-writing shows that, in a great variety of ways, diaries have consistently been used for their marginal or supplementary role, which simultaneously constructs and qualifies a literary œuvre and author-figure.

The evidence of these diaries, all written in the nineteenth century, reveals the heterogeneous nature of early settler society in the Eastern Cape. Generalizations can only be of the most tenuous kind in such a small sample; but women tend to dwell on the domestic, the men on their public lives, the most reticent about their private lives are the soldiers. There is one diary which can be described as personal; the diarists did not regard their diaries as appropriate repositories of their personal triumphs and failures. The perceptions formed in Britain about the land and people of Africa are not drastically modified upon arrival unless the diarist experiences a prolongued contact with either.