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The Canadian literary canon contains few writers of such diversity as Adele Wiseman. Although she is chiefly remembered for her two novels, her canon extends well beyond the fiction for which she is chiefly remembered. In fact, Wiseman was a skilled practitioner of numerous genres including drama, the essay, the short story, and the memoir. To discern the creative vision underlying Wiseman's oeuvre, this thesis devotes one chapter to each of her major works: The Sacrifice (ch. 1); The Lovebound (ch. 2); Crackpot (ch. 3); Testimonial Dinner (ch. 4); Old Woman at Play (ch. 5); and Memoirs of a Book Molesting Childhood and Other Essays and "Goon of the Moon and the Expendables" (ch. 6). While existing criticism of Wiseman's writing generally concentrates on single dimensions of her personhood (i.e. faith, gender, nationality), this thesis suggests that a more valid analysis of Wiseman's oeuvre would acknowledge its hybridity. The diversity apparent in Wiseman's canon should be seen as a reflection of her triply marginalized subject position as a Jewish Canadian female writer. As such, the thesis draws on feminist theory, post-colonial theory and Jewish hermeneutics to elucidate Wiseman's creative vision. By combining these three theoretical perspectives, one can ascertain how Wiseman's faith, gender and nationality intersected to create the unique canon she left behind. Because Wiseman was such an astute critic of her own work, this thesis relies heavily upon her own statements about her craft. The Adele Wiseman Fonds at the W. B. Scott Library, York University was an invaluable source for such information. Of particular importance was Wiseman's thirty-year correspondence with Margaret Laurence, her best friend, and Malcolm Ross, her mentor. These letters provide readers with a rare opportunity to assess Wiseman's creative vision. They confirm that Wiseman's stylistic experimentation was an outgrowth of her peripheral status in mainstream society. Her need to question and reevaluate existing literary conventions reflected her belief that such conventions were restrictive and exclusionary. Despite the heterogeneity apparent in Wiseman's work, it is nonetheless united by a single underlying vision: Wiseman writes in order to teach people how to live--particularly in communion with others. All of her writing radiates immense compassion for human beings, but especially the dispossessed. Her writing is a plea to reject hierarchical structures in society--structures which divide people into "haves" and "have-nots." She presents readers with an alternative, salutary vision of a world where such divisions are obliterated in favour of heterogeneity and an accompanying awareness of each individual's unique contribution to the whole.

One of the key characteristics of the comic discourse of parody is a complex double-structuredness that allows it to inscribe a sense of difference at the heart of the similarities often informing constructions of literary traditions and cultural continuities. Parody is, to use Mikhail Bakhtin's terms, a vari-directional double-voiced discourse that simultaneously draws on a reader's familiarity with textual and discursive antecedents while at the same time encouraging a dialectical reconsideration of the appropriateness and relevance of those models in light of the cultural milieu into which such models were imported. Victorian Canada was a culture defined by such a period of transition. Dedicated to inscribing a sense of common heritage with Old World traditions, most writers and thinkers in Victorian Canada aimed for the creation of a unifying national culture that they believed could distinctively and appropriately represent. Canada to itself in terms of familiar Old World conventions. Such key concepts as land and landedness, and such vital activities as reading and writing, came to be defined within such arguments according to Old World codes and standards. For prominent Canadian fiction writers of the nineteenth century, parody was understood as an appropriate discourse for exploring more fully both the aspirations and anxieties burdening an emerging nation struggling toward cultural self-definition. Avoiding a monologic transplantation of Old World textual models or cultural presumptions, these writers, while acknowledging the acceptance and appeal of such Old World benchmarks within a still nascent culture, challenge their contemporaries to reconsider this inhibitive reliance on textual and discursive structures imported from other places and other times. They encourage an imaginative exploration of other ways of representing Canada's distinctiveness, insistently laying bare the limitations inherent in a naive confidence in the portability of literary conventions and cultural presumptions. Including as part of their own narratives the very structures they set out to question, Canadian parodists emphasize how identity is the product of testing rather than accepting preestablished imaginative and literary boundaries. The rise to prominence of Stephen Leacock in the early decades of this century signals both an epistemic shift in Canada and a radical transformation of this country's parodic spirit. Moving in his parodies toward a more transnational vision of Canada and Canadian concerns, Leacock at the same time recognizes in the parodic a vital source of kindliness. Whereas parody is for his Victorian counterparts a strategy for defining and nurturing a sense of distinctly Canadian culture, for Leacock it becomes vitally allied to survival in a world of crumbling foundations.

This study is of pre-Confederation writing from 1759-1867, and constitutes a reflection on the beginnings of the emergence of an autonomous literary institution in Canada. It deals with the grounding of the literary institution, and with questions related to the creation and emergence of national literatures. It does not attempt a totalizing examination of writing done during this vast time frame, but discusses, in a number of synchronic "case studies," some significant moments in the literary life of the colony. Each chapter dislocates the focus that is typically directed at a handful of disparate instances at the expense of other activities related to the practices of reading and writing, and of lesser-known writers who worked in less "literary" forms, and is intended to reorient our perception of some "canonical" writers of this period. In so doing, it questions some of the organizing frameworks that have been applied to Canadian literature, and proposes a broader conception of the literature of this period, especially since the literary field was only just beginning to define itself in the colony. An introductory section provides a discussion of some of the critical discourses that shaped the study of Canadian literature from the moment of its full institutionalization, in the 1960s and 1970s, and onwards. The second part of the opening section points out some of the consequences of these critical discourses for the conception of a Canadian national literature, and relates them to some earlier formulations of Canada's literary history. The first of the "case studies" is devoted to Frances Brooke and the reception in Canada of The History of Emily Montague (1769). The second chapter focuses on Thomas Cary and attempts to situate him not only as the author of one of the earliest poems printed in the colony, but also as editor of the Quebec Mercury. In this capacity he played a role in the early practices of reading and writing in the colony, and contributed to the largely political public discourse of his time. Chapter Three builds on this discussion by dealing with questions of identity and political allegiance as articulated in some early writings of Upper Canada. It starts out by examining the case of Julia Catherine Beckwith Hart and why Canadian critics have focused on one of her novels in particular, then proceeds to consider the uses that Bishop Strachan and politician Barnabas Bidwell made of writing and printing to sway public opinion and foster competing conceptions of identity. The fourth chapter looks at the role Canadian critics have assigned John Richardson. The concluding chapter, on Thomas D'Arcy McGee, reconsiders the role he is commonly seen to have played as a "father" of Canadian literature and visionary of a "new northern nationality." McGee's poetic figuring of Canada's past in the Canadian Ballads, and Occasional Verses (1858) was followed in subsequent writings by a dismissal of historical concerns in the name of an identity that was to be a thing of the future. The methodological approach suited to this endeavour is that suggested by literary systems theory, since it allows us to take into consideration the complex of factors or "interactions" that give rise to the practices of "literature."

This dissertation combines literary analysis with genre study and cultural history to trace the evolution of a tradition of nineteenth-century Canadian satiric fiction. Through a close reading of canonical texts examined within the contexts of their production, I analyze the moral, social, and political norms that inform nineteenth-century Canadian satire and determine how these norms have either been maintained or modified. The introduction defines the key terms of the thesis by reviewing the principle theoretical arguments surrounding the study of satire, and by elaborating the critical stance as one informed by the reading practices of New Criticism and Historicism. Part One explores the development of the satiric sketch in the Colonial Period and focuses on Thomas McCulloch's The Stepsure Letters (1821--3) and Thomas Chandler Haliburton's The Clockmaker (first series, 1836). In their condemnation of the vices and follies exhibited by their neighbours, McCulloch and Haliburton share many of the same norms; however, the evolution of the satiric viewpoint is one of ever-broadening scope. Both writers focus on similar class and social issues, for instance, but Haliburton also considers larger political matters centred around the complicated issue of Imperialism. Part Two examines the rise of the satiric novel in the Confederation Period and focuses on James De Mille's A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder (1888) and Sara Jeannette Duncan's The Imperialist (1904), which both take up the "Imperial Question." De Mille's fantastical adventure questions both Christian doctrine and Victorian values in its profound exploration of the individual challenge to define a code of values by which to live, and its thoughtful inquiry into the imperialistic urge to impose those values on others. Duncan's authentic depiction of turn-of-the-century small town Ontario's emotional and intellectual responses to the political debate on international relations satirizes the ignorant assumptions and lack of imagination displayed by both Canadians and Britons. The conclusion surveys the ways in which these writers urge their readers to recognize the "wider fields and chances" available to them; that is, the geographical, philosophical, and imaginative spaces open to all colonists/Canadians, and the attendant social, economic, and spiritual opportunities, risks, and responsibilities to be encountered there.

The central aim of Recovering Stephen Leacock: Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town and the Cultural Production of Value is simultaneously to rupture Leacock's canonized cultural signature and to recover the complexity of his cultural work. To this end, the present study maps Leacock's complexity as an antimodernist discourse of "accommodation and protest" in response to the cultural tensions of the late nineteenth- and twentieth-centuries. Moreover, through the conceptual model of Pierre Bourdieu's field of cultural production, this study explores how Leacock's antimodernist complexity is encoded in the production of his antimodernist discourse, career, texts--his cultural work--and the cultural authority and value invested in that work. The Introduction provides a critical survey of Leacock's production and reception, and outlines the relevance of T. J. Jackson Lears' notion of antimodernism, and Pierre Bourdieu's field of cultural production, to Leacock studies. Chapter One, "Discourse: Visionary and Reactionary--Leacock as an Antimodernist" discusses Leacock's work as an interdisciplinary antimodernist discourse of cultural authority and value. Chapter Two, "Career: The Perfect Salesman and A Cultural Authority," explores Leacock's careers as a professional writer and academic in terms of his antimodernist negotiation of authority and value. Chapter Three, "Text: Antimodernist Sketches of a Little Town," provides a test-case reading of Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town as an antimodernist text that reflects a number of Leacock's concerns towards the realization of social justice. Finally, the Conclusion intimates how this present study as a whole underscores the need, and highlights the possibility, of reading Leacock in terms of broader, international literary-historical periods.

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