Thesis--Technische Hochschule, Berlin. / Includes index. Bibliography: p. 187-196.

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Within the communities of The Double Hook, Fugitive Pieces, The Shipping News, and Crackpot, unexplainable and incomprehensible phenomena identify and define grace. Chapter one examines The Double Hook; analyzing the community's decimated state at the opening of the novel, it proceeds to an understanding of the role of grace within the community's recuperation of wholeness. Chapter two, focusing on Fugitive Pieces, examines an individual's responsibility in receiving grace and the manner in which grace expands when it is actively present in a community. Chapter three explores issues of incest, adultery, and death, which confront the community in The Shipping News. Rather than being destroyed by disaster, the community, consistently through the grace it receives, extends grace to those who most need it. Finally, chapter four reveals a community reconfigured by grace from a place of exclusion into a place of inclusion and restoration in Crackpot. The different perspective that each novel presents on the relationship between community and grace offers further insight into the incomprehensibility of grace and its consistent presence in Canadian literature.

This thesis examines selected representations of Newfoundland cultural identity in twentieth century Newfoundland literature from Norman Duncan, E. J. Pratt and George Allan England to Bernice Morgan, Patrick Kavanagh and Wayne Johnston. The discussion is located within a broad context of popular and scholarly writings on the subject and a conceptual framework influenced by Benedict Anderson's book Imagined Communities and Seamus Heaney's essay "The Sense of Place." Nineteenth century attempts to maintain the distinctiveness of Newfoundland identity were politically motivated by advocates of home rule, civil liberties and sovereignty, and constituted part of the rhetoric and mobilization that resulted in responsible government and dominion status for the colony. In the twentieth century, a variety of writers addressed the subject, some from the perspective of visitors, others from the perspective of residents. Early in the century, this resulted in representations in the heroic mode that focussed upon the struggle of outport Newfoundlanders to wrest a living from the sea. At mid-century, this myth of heroic Newfoundland was supplanted by the romantic myth of the old outport in which the community life of Newfoundland coastal villages was recorded and extolled. By the 1970s, the outports had become symbolic of Newfoundland but by this time they were also beset by enormous changes brought about by the Second World War, Confederation with Canada, and government policies of industrialization and resettlement. Some writers responded by intensifying explorations of the cultural roots of the province in the traditional life, others addressed the challenges of the present, which included issues of neo-colonialism and economic imperialism as well as cultural dislocation. In all of this, Newfoundland writers contributed in significant ways to the imagining of their community and the survival of a country of the mind.

This thesis establishes the presence of pilgrimage in Canadian literature as reflective of Canadian cultural and global changes. It shows the enduring archetypal characteristics of pilgrimage from the earliest pre-Confederation travel writing to contemporary and postmodern novels. The topic of Canadian literary pilgrimage allows for an eclectic and necessarily multi-disciplinary approach and also for the study of the earliest Canadian letters and contemporary novelists, as well as for a breadth of forms, including journals, letters, archival sermons, dramatic works, poetry, and contemporary Canadian novels. Chapter one begins with the cultural figure of Brebeuf as pilgrim first in The Jesuit Relations (1632-1673), proceeds to E. J. Pratt's long-poem Brebeuf and his Brethren (1940), on-site research at the memorial to Brebeuf in Midland, Ontario, and concludes with the post-colonial revisiting of this figure in James W. Nichol's dramatic work, Saint-Marie Among the Hurons (1980), and in Brian Moore's Black Robe (1985). Chapter two turns to Oliver Goldsmith's The Rising Village and explores Protestant pilgrimage, marking the material and spiritual progress of that pilgrimage. The thesis then looks at Goldsmith's work in conjunction with the influential sermons and journals of Bishop John Inglis of Nova Scotia. Chapter three follows pilgrimage into more contemporary works in Robertson Davies' Fifth Business and Jane Urquhart's The Stone Carvers, incorporating post-structuralist discussions of the nomad as pilgrim or anti-pilgrim figure and the implications of homelessness to the pilgrimage paradigm. Chapters four and five analyze Richard B. Wright's The Age of Longing and Clara Callan, and Timothy Findley's The Butterfly Plague and Headhunter, which are explored in light of some of Jacques Derrida's writing and the critical utopian studies of Ernst Bloch.

"Occupants of Memory: War in Twentieth-Century Canadian Fiction" examines key novels and short stories about wartime and post-war experience spanning nine decades. Beginning with Sara Jeannette Duncan's The Imperialist (1904) and ending with Timothy Findley's "Stones" (1988), this dissertation juxtaposes works by such well-known Canadian authors as Ralph Connor, Hugh MacLennan, and L.M. Montgomery with lesser-known but important works by William Allister, Charles Yale Harrison, Edward McCourt, and Colin McDougall. Unlike previous studies of Canadian war literature, most of which focus on an individual author, a single war, or a particular theme, this dissertation argues that war fiction is a tradition in which authors influence, reflect, and counter one another throughout the century. Discourses of social memory and nationalism/anti-nationalism provide a theoretical basis for discussion, and descriptions of major events from the South African War, through the two world wars, to the Cold War form an historical context for authors and their works. References to European and American war literature and its critics show Canadian works to be comparable to, yet different from, their international counterparts. Particularly notable is the way in which Canadian works emphasize a dichotomy between romance and realism, rarely broaching the high modernism that is the hallmark of many international works. Occupants of Memory lays the groundwork for a broad critical discourse of Canadian war literature and its related subjects.

As the environmental crisis worsens, the time has never been more ripe for a scholarly reclamation of Ontario writer and environmental activist Wayland Drew (1932--1998), known only marginally by Canadian literary scholars for two novels: The Wabeno Feast (1973) and Halfway Man (1989). In addition to these works, Drew published a trilogy, The Erthring Cycle (1984--86), which explores environmental holocaust, and several ecological essays, travelogues, and other nonfictional works. Forming a unique genre of "evolutionary fiction" rooted in the sciences of ecology and evolution and in his intimate knowledge of traditional aboriginal land practices, Drew stands alone in the Canadian literary tradition for making the global environmental crisis the central focus of his writing. His fictional and nonfictional oeuvre launches an unremitting critique of the anthropocentric discourses of humanism and reductivist science, as well as the current debates about cultural identity politics, in the interest of highlighting the "mystery" of evolutionary and cosmological history and our responsibility, as the now-dominant species, to pursue homeostatic living in order to protect the planet for the future of all biotic life. Moreover, Drew recognizes the irony that our species is driven by instincts that, if left unchecked, ultimately may lead to biospheric ruin: human curiosity and an urge for "progress," for instance, must be restrained if we are to safeguard the future of the planet. Drew argues with a voice unique in the tradition of Canadian Literature that humans must embrace their evolutionary inconsequentiality, and nurture their connections with other lifeforms (via a philosophy of "mutual aid"), as part of a broader survival strategy. His sustained argument is that not only Western nations but all of the Earth's denizens need to undertake a radical epistemological shift if we are to survive.