Abstract not available.

Abstract not available.

Abstract not available.

Dans la présente thèse, j'ai réflechi sur la création littéraire. Dans un premier temps, j'ai écrit une nouvelle version du mythe d'Iphigénie. Animé d'un désir de me distancier des autres versions, j'ai adopté une stratégie qui consiste à redéfinir le mythe en fonction de recherches en archéologie, sous une perspective féministe et en intégrant des considérations sociologiques et politiques contemporaines. S'ouvre alors un questionnement sur la réception d'une telle oeuvre qui débouche sur une analyse d'une certaine dramaturgie franco-ontarienne qui mène à une réflexion plus profonde sur ma propre démarche artistique. Du réel qui nourrit la fiction à la fiction qui se nourrit d'elle-même, j'ai pu voir les signes d'une décheance esthétique dans mon parcours créatif. La découverte d'une forme élémentaire au coeur même d'une bonne partie de mes oeuvres m'incite à reconsidérer mon engagement littéraire.

Madness is a recurrent aspect of Margaret Atwood's novels to date and represents perhaps her most discomforting challenge to the reader who is implicated as co-creator, interpreter, and participant of the fiction. Her novels question the binary of normality and madness by situating madness both in the margins and foreground, thereby exposing "normality" as a tendentious construct designed to obscure contemporary Western society's psychic imbalance caused by fear of the unknown within the self. This dissertation employs a psycho-social method of investigating madness with a concurrent assessment of reader-involvement strategies, mediated through a theoretical framework based on C. G. Jung, R. D. Laing, and Wolfgang Iser. The particular areas of investigation include: Atwood's comical representation of psychology as a prominent undercurrent of popular culture in The Edible Woman, and her contrasting serious---even threatening---portrayal of normative limits as social constructs in Bodily Harm. With regard to the individual, Lady Oracle exhibits the role of fantasy in psychic balance and posits the protagonist as an unlikely manifestation of "normality." Although still focused on the individual, Life Before Man represents the converse: the capacity for fantasy is lost in the dissociated condition of "normalized" characters. The Jungian process of individuation is studied through the projection of one's shadow figure in The Robber Bride. Finally, Atwood's most direct and strategic implication of the reader in determining the variable boundaries of (in)sanity is examined in Alias Grace. Ultimately, Atwood's presentation of madness insists on the reader's involvement and situates her/him in a position of potential self-recognition.

This thesis examines the work of five Canadian writers who use their fiction to recreate an immigrant past and to mythologize an originary moment in Canada: a migrant's arrival and settlement in a new land. Mordecai Richter's Solomon Gursky Was Here (1989), Sky Lee's Disappearing Moon Cafe (1990), Jane Urquhart's Away (1993), Lawrence Hill's Any Known Blood (1997), and Nino Ricci's trilogy, Lives of the Saints (1990), In a Glass House (1993), and Where She Has Gone (1997) each express a nostalgic longing for an authenticating mythology that will give a previously silenced ethno-cultural group a place in the national narrative. Nostalgia literally means a painful return home, and the narrators of these novels express a bittersweet longing for a Canadian past, for a Canadian home. While nostalgia has traditionally played a central role in ethnic literature, this longing has typically rested on a nostalgic desire to return to a distant homeland. Yet the narrators of this study express a nostalgia for a different kind of origins---for origins in a new land. Richter, Lee, Urquhart, Hill, and Ricci create detailed genealogies in their novels that show how their different groups---Jewish, Chinese, Irish, Black, and Italian---helped build the nation and what roles each of these groups played in Canada's past. This thesis thus reveals that the interrogation of Canada's master narratives is not complete and that, even for later generations of immigrants, there remains a desire to establish their identities as Canadian The five writers of this study are deliberately challenging the authority of Canada's dominant cultural paradigm by recreating the immigrant experiences of their ethno-cultural groups in order to refute the myth of two founding nations and to establish Canada as home for their own particular groups. With their mythologized versions of history, these writers are striving to include neglected and forgotten voices in the story of Canada.

The family is often viewed as the most basic social institution and the one on which broader institutions are founded, and traditionally in Canada heterosexual marriage has resided at the heart of the nuclear family. The increasing prominence of adultery in English-Canadian literature throughout the twentieth century, however, raises questions regarding the nature of marriage and the duties and responsibilities associated with it. The challenges implicit in literary works concerned with adultery can fruitfully be read against changing contemporary social mores as evinced, for example, in amendments to Canadian divorce legislation. Moreover, consideration of points of intersection between material experience and literary representations of marriage and adultery can help to clarify shifts in Canadian moral and cultural values, such as the movement toward a more conservative view of adultery in the closing decades of the twentieth century.

This dissertation is an interdisciplinary project that brings dance studies to bear on a representative sampling of early Canadian novels, including Frances Brooke's The History of Emily Montague (1769), Rosanna Leprohon's Antoinette de Mirecourt (1864), William Kirby's The Golden Dog (1877), John Richardson's Wacousta (1832), Sara Jeannette Duncan's A Daughter of Today (1894), and L.M. Montgomery's Anne and Emily series, as well as The Blue Castle (1909-27). The main argument of the dissertation is that the scenes and language of various forms of dance in these novels can be read as markers of textual concern with colonial and national health, whether physical, mental, or moral. The analysis is based on archival and theoretical investigation of various forms of dance (British social dance, Native dance, French court ballet, Romantic ballet, Delsartian and modern dance) including their contemporary cultural and ideological significance. At the broadest level, this dissertation demonstrates how the relatively new field of dance studies -- the theoretical and critical study of dance in its various forms and functions -- can enrich literary criticism, in this case the study of early Canadian literary texts. The close analysis of dance in literature, when allied with an understanding of the particular dances themselves, can produce startling new avenues of literary investigation.

Focusing on a selection of pioneering works, which include Margaret Atwood's The Edible Woman (1969), Robert Kroetsch's Gone Indian (1973), Robertson Davies's The Rebel Angels (1981), and Carol Shields's Swann (1987), this dissertation traces the uncharted emergence and development of the Canadian academic novel and argues that it should be recognized alongside its already well-documented American and British counterparts as constituting a significant contribution to the sub-genre. The novels under consideration, published between 1969 and 1987, directly respond to the contemporaneous growth and expansion of the Canadian university as well as, in light of this expansion, its resultant growing pains: in this saturated academic climate, producing unique scholarship that would both secure the individual's professional status as well as contribute to the broader public in a discernable fashion became increasingly difficult. In response, these novelists, whose works are set primarily in English departments, target the scholar's tendency to prioritize professional self-interest above scholarly idealism rather than strike a productive balance between the two. Entering into an ongoing dialogue about the value of humanities (particularly literary) scholarship, they ultimately suggest that when alternative models of scholarly inquiry are adopted in place of standard paradigms and the disinterested pursuit of knowledge remains the foundational guiding principle, the resulting research has the potential to offer invaluable insights with broader cultural and social resonances.

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