The thesis is a short novel, Adam's Navel, followed by a critical afterword. / The narrator, Sam Meir, a first year medical student at McGill University, recounts the events of the unsuccessful road trip from Montreal to Seattle that he made in the summer before his last year of undergraduate study. Sam attempts the trip with his girlfriend, but his increasing obsession with historical, and mythical figures disrupts their relationship and their travel plans. As the two travel deeper into the middle of America, Sam realizes he cannot leave his family or his past behind him. Thematically, Adam's Navel is a contemplation of the meaning of family, tradition, and the intense sense of gravity that results from an historical awareness. / The critical afterword explores the function of repetition in the transcendental narrative strategies of certain quasi-mythological heroes of the American canon, Huckleberry Finn and Nick Carraway. As is required, Sam's narration is included in the discussion.

Examining the potential for conversation between poets within the glosa, this work responds to the lack of critical treatment of the poetic form by opening up new avenues for consideration. In order to understand the role of conversation within a poem, this thesis parallels the glosa with the concept collaboration, the dramatic monologue, the pas de deux, the elegy and the dedication collection in contemporary Canadian writing. Through comparative analysis with these other forms, this thesis develops new understandings of the way in which lyric subjectivity can be conditioned by poly-vocal poetry. The study culminates in a collection of poems entitled, Songs of the Involuntary Night Choir, which further questions the relationships between poets and their social context, their readers and their peers and predecessors. / En recherchant les possibilités qu'offre l'étude de la conversation entre poètes dans le «glosa», cet ouvrage répond à l'absence de traitement scolaire de la forme poétique en ouvrant de nouvelles avenues théoriques. Afin de comprendre le rôle de la conversation dans un poème, ce mémoire met en parallèle le glosa avec «la collection collaborative», le monologue dramatique, le «pas de deux», l'élégie et la collection de dévouement dans la littérature canadienne contemporaine. Grâce à une analyse comparative avec ces autres formes, ce mémoire développe une nouvelle perspective quant à la manière dont la subjectivité lyrique peut être influencée par la poésie poly-vocale. L'étude aboutit à un recueil de poèmes intitulé «Songs of the Involuntary Night Choir» qui approfondit l'examen des relations entre les poètes et leur contexte social, leurs lecteurs, leurs contemporains et leurs prédécesseurs.

This dissertation focuses on five closely knit writers who, between 1962 and 1981, produced exemplary historiographic poetry that guided their contemporaries. Al Purdy, John Newlove, Barry McKinnon, Andrew Suknaski, and Margaret Atwood were the chief voices of a literary mode that I term "modernist lyric historiography": a meditative modernist lyric that is self-critical, self-consciously incapable of claiming and skeptical about any claim to authority over history, and fundamentally historiographic (in the sense that it synthesizes, discards, and/or critically evaluates fragments of history). Arguably, Purdy was the inaugurator of lyric historiography: in the early 1960s, he experimented with a modernist lyric attentive to a broad vision of Canadian history. Newlove was one of many poets who saw Purdy's lyric historiography as a mode that could be used to provide insight into neglected prairie histories. As part of their search for more intimate connections to history that could sustain longer, narrative poems, McKinnon and Suknaski adapted lyric historiography to explore the familial past. Atwood reimagined lyric historiography as the search for Canadian "foremothers," proto-feminists that could serve as models for the second-wave feminist movement.Addressing the archives, creative writing, and historical contexts of these five writers, this dissertation proposes two primary claims. First, modernism persisted well into the 1970s (and even beyond) and shared with Canadian postmodernism a sophisticated approach to the idea of "history." Second, modernist lyric historiography was a continued investigation into one's ability to claim authority over historical narratives. Many modernists found some measure of such authority by exploring the most intimate connections to the past, which tended to be literal and figurative familial ones. / Cette thèse traite de cinq écrivains, qui, entre 1962 et 1981, ont créé des modèles de poésie historiographique, qui ont guidé leurs contemporains modernistes. Al Purdy, John Newlove, Barry McKinnon, Andrew Suknaski et Margaret Atwood ont été les figures principales d'un mode littéraire que nous appelons «l'historiographie lyrique moderniste». Ce terme désigne une poésie lyrique moderniste et méditative, qui est autocritique, réticente à revendiquer une quelconque autorité sur l'histoire et méfiante de cette autorité lorsqu'elle est invoquée, ainsi que fondamentalement historiographique. Au début des années 1960, Purdy expérimente avec la poésie moderniste sur l'histoire du Canada. Newlove considérait l'historiographie lyrique de Purdy comme une manière d'écrire qui pourrait offrir une nouvelle façon de voir le passé négligé des prairies. McKinnon et Suknaski ont adapté l'historiographie lyrique en examinant le passé de leur famille. Atwood a réinventé l'historiographie lyrique en tant que recherche des «aïeules» canadiennes, des proto-féministes qui pourraient servir de modèle à la deuxième génération de féministes. En tenant compte des archives, de l'écriture et des contextes historiques de ces cinq écrivains, cette thèse propose deux idées principales. Premièrement, nous affirmons que le modernisme a persisté durant l'après-guerre et qu'il partageait avec le postmodernisme canadien une approche sophistiquée et critique de l'histoire. Deuxièmement, nous soutenons que l'historiographie lyrique moderniste consistait en un questionnement persistant sur la capacité de revendiquer une certaine autorité concernant un récit historique. Plusieurs modernistes ont trouvé une certaine autorité en explorant les liens les plus intimes avec le passé, qui avaient tendance à être des liens familiaux littéraux et métaphoriques.

This thesis defines and traces female community across Elizabeth Gaskell's novels Cranford, North and South, and Wives and Daughters. Gaskell utilizes the fictionality of these communities to explore different ways of being for women. Here women control not only the plot, but their own lives.

The thesis consists of the first part of a four-part novel and critical afterword. / The Slaughter is an account of Peter Scythes' poetic attempt to accommodate himself in a world he perceives as strange. In this mythological novel, character development takes place where the carnivalesque and the fantastic intersect. / The required critical afterward is in three parts: a summary Mikhail Bakhtin's writings on Rabelais; a consideration of plot ambiguities in the text The Slaughter and Henry James' The Turn of The Screw; and a discussion of how Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter and The Slaughter use language, memory and myth-making as essential structural and narrative devices.

A novel, Enfilade simultaneously relates the stories of Alistair Preston, a young soldier in the Canadian army in Belgium during the First World War, and that of his fiancee and family in the Eastern Townships of Southern Quebec. Elspeth, his fiancee, is a school teacher and the Preston family are beef farmers. Told from several different points of view, Enfilade addresses the psychological, cultural and aesthetic implications of the Canadian experience in the Ypres Salient in 1917, and, more generally, in the First World War. Primary among the novel's concerns are the psychological change brought about by the experience of industrialised warfare and the resulting difficulty in regaining a sense of normality and home, both for the combatants themselves and for those to whom they returned, and the enormous gap created between the generation that fought in the war and that of their parents.

This dissertation reads a group of Old English prose and verse texts that linguistic evidence suggests probably originated in Mercia, within the context of eighth- and ninth-century Mercian cultural and political history. This approach complements and supplements existing scholarship, offering evidence that the theory that a culture of vernacular translation and composition thrived in Mercia has fruitful explanatory powers. It articulates a theoretical narrative of the early period of Old English literature, and identifies two major trends that can be linked to the political and material culture of Mercia in the eighth and ninth centuries. The first is the proliferation of vernacular hagiography, both in prose and verse. In the first chapter, I offer an overview of Anglo-Saxon texts connected with the cult of Guthlac, a saint closely connected to the Mercian dynasty in the eighth and ninth centuries. This chapter offers an interpretation of Felix's Vita sancti Guthlaci as an iteration of Mercian identity, and highlights the way in which Guthlac A asserts and emphasizes the saint’s Mercian identity. I then propose a revival of the cult of Guthlac linked to a crisis in the Mercian succession in the ninth century, to which the possibly Cynewulfian account of Guthlac's death in Guthlac B, the Old English prose translation of Felix's life, and the entries in the Old English Martyrology, may be connected. In Chapter 2, I offer a reading of the hagiographical poetry of Cynewulf, namely Juliana and Elene, in light of the remarkably – and arguably uniquely – powerful position of women in Mercia from the reign of Offa onwards. The early cult of Juliana appears to have a Mercian bias, and the empowered female saints in Cynewulf's works may also be connected to evidence for female literacy in the Tiberius-group manuscripts, all of which originate in eighth- and ninth-century Southumbria. In Chapter 3, I read the Old English translation of Bede's Historia ecclesiastica, a major though until recently little-studied prose work, in relation to other texts with a literal style of translation and a hagiographical focus, and its apparent interest in Mercian conciliar culture. I also propose that the style of illumination of the earliest extant copies of the Old English Historia ecclesiastica may be influenced by Mercian, Tiberius style. The second major trend which the material and literary culture of Mercia manifests in this period is an early Orientalism, imitating and appropriating Eastern models as signs of power and sophistication. Sculptures such as those at Breedon-on-the-Hill, Leicestershire, in which Mary is modelled on Byzantine sculpture, or the dinar of Caliph al-Mansur (773-4), reminted as coinage for Offa, demonstrate a deep engagement with Oriental culture prevalent in Mercia during this period. Several decorative elements in the eighth- and ninth-century Tiberius group manuscripts, which have stylistic affinities and are often associated with Mercia, also have Oriental origins. This same phenomenon is traceable in the literary record. For example, Cynewulf's works engage in various ways with different regions of the Orient, including the Mediterranean, Africa, Rome, Jerusalem and India. The Old English Martyrology combines Insular and continental saints with Eastern saints. The Oriental character of two of the prose texts of BL Cotton Vitellius A. xv., The Letter of Alexander to Aristotle and The Wonders of the East, both usually considered Mercian on linguistic grounds, has been long noted. Together with its manuscript neighbours, Wonders and Beowulf, I consider the Letter's interest in the wider world, as well as its theorization of kingship, by which it might be considered a speculum regum. This thesis reads these texts in the light of various forms of evidence for Mercian literary culture, including linguistic characteristics and preexisting scholarship. In so doing, it fleshes out a theoretical narrative of vernacular literature prior to the late ninth-century Alfredian renaissance.

In 1969, Dorothy Livesay affirmed that, beginning in the 1930s, the Canadian long poem had evolved into a new genre by following the "experimentations" originally made by John Grierson---father of the British documentary movement and NFB film commissioner---in film ("Documentary Poem" 269). Echoing the well-known Griersonian assertion that documentary film should "interpret Canada to Canadians," Livesay also attached a special nation-building value to the Canadian documentary poem by stating that its methods and conventions "subtly [...] cast light on the landscape, the topography, the flora and the fauna as well as the social structure" of Canada (269). Prompted by Livesay's statements, and by the current lack of scholarship examining the Griersonian heritage of her documentary poetry, this thesis performs a critical examination of the points of continuity between the Griersonian tradition of nationalist filmmaking and the Canadian documentary poem as Livesay defined it. Drawing on key Canadian film policy documents of the modernist era and on close readings of seminal documentary texts by the National Film Board, I trace the ideological maneuvers and narrative practices that the Griersonian documentary traditionally deployed in order to fulfill its mandate of interpreting Canada to Canadians, foregrounding the representational gaps and disturbances underpinning these conventions. I then examine the extent to which these conventions penetrated Livesay's own documentary project, highlight the efforts she made in order to transcend the limitations of her original format. In an effort to chart the aesthetic and political ramifications of this representational struggle, in a concluding section I explore the ongoing reappraisal of the Griersonian documentary tradition in key postmodern documentaries by Livesay and another prominent Canadian documentary poet, Daphne Marlatt.

The purpose of this study was to analyze the ways in which 19th century Gothic fiction novelists Charles Brockden Brow and James Hogg explore the themes of religious enthusiasm and divine revelation. A close look at these texts reveals a common interest in the tension between the imagination and reality. By analyzing the philosophical and theological roots of these issues it becomes clear that Wieland and Confessions of a Justified Sinner mirror the anxieties of 19th century Anglo American culture. Questions regarding voice and authority, the importance of testimony, and religious seduction are common to both novels. I maintain that these authors comment on the obscure nature of human rationale by presenting readers with narrators that exhibit traits of delusion and spiritual awakening.

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