The linking short narratives explored in this study-- Anna Jameson's Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada, Sara Jeannette Duncan's The Pool In the Desert and Mavis Gallant's Home Truths— employ first-person narrators to both comply with and subvert dominant ideas of the gendered female subject. In addition, these representative linking narrative texts demonstrate that choices to do with form, as well as subject and theme, may both support and subvert the discourses of the time and place in which they are written. My exploration of these three representative texts draws from W.H. New's fragmentation theory of short narratives, Gérard Genette's narrative theory of voice and mood, Paul de Man's problematization of generic distinctions between autobiography and fiction, and Julia Kristeva's theory of the speaking subject as text in process and vice versa. Jameson's Romantic "I" uses the miscellany's flexible form of linking short narratives autobiographically to both reify and recuse nineteenth-century genre conventions of travel narrative and the gendered position of women in Europe and Canada. As the Recusant "I," first person narration in Duncan's quartet of stories figures splits not only between female desire and gender codes, but also between creative imagination and conditions of exile. With a psychopoetics of the unsaid, the Remembering "I" of Gallant's linking narratives figures female subjectivity as a process of both psychology and history. These women-authored linking narratives challenge assumptions that first-person narration is univocal, and therefore problematize distinctions between autobiography and fiction. In their uses of the linking narrative form, they also challenge aesthetic criteria that privilege wholeness and unity— of the novel, for example— in concepts of mimesis dominating representations of reality in their respective periods. These first-person linking narratives use the voice of the "I" subversively, telling the doubled position of the female subject in the discourses of genre and gender. / Graduate

This dissertation is an analysis of writings and illustrative material by Canadian travel writers Anna Jameson, Mina Hubbard, and Margaret Laurence, that attempts to reconcile the masculinist focus of postcolonial criticism and the charges of cultural imperialism levied against feminist criticism with the role postcolonial and feminist theories play in understanding women's travel narratives. I argue that Jameson's 1838 Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada, Hubbard's 1908 A Woman's Way through Unknown Labrador, and Laurence's 1963 The Prophet's Camel Bell provide maps of the political, cultural, and physical features of the areas through which the women travelled, and of their own social and cultural positions. Their mapping is also done through more graphic media---including Hubbard's cartographic work, Hubbard's and Laurence's photographs, and Jameson's unpublished sketches---which reflect and complicate the written negotiations of gender and imperialism in which the three women engage. / Because my aim is to reconcile theoretical contradictions, I examine in detail books that clearly dramatize colonialist or anti-imperialist approaches and considerations or exemplifications of issues of gender. Not surprisingly, the three writers draw very different maps of those subjects, as a function of their disparate geographical and historical contexts. This study reveals, however, that the maps themselves are drawn with similar tools, which include an anti-racist philosophy and an acute awareness of women's position in their own and the visited societies. Thus Jameson makes philosophical connections between mid-nineteenth-century feminist and anti-racist theoretical approaches; Hubbard provides insights into an early twentieth-century woman traveller's relationship to First Nations men who have both more and less power than she; and Laurence serves as a witness to and astute reporter on oppression of mid-twentieth century women by specific colonial and patriarchal forces.

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