Abstract Not Available.

Abstract Not Available.

Dorothy Livesay's poetic exploration of love illuminates the relationship that exists between the individual woman artist and a culture shaped by men's experiences and stories. Chapter 1 surveys the critical treatment of Livesay's love poems, illustrating how theoretical superimposition can distort the subtext which gives the poems their energy and power. Chapter 2 analyses the thematic and imagistic portrayal of the love relationship present in the poems written during early womanhood, and establishes a link between sexuality and textuality. Chapter 3 explores the violent sexual/textual conflicts contained within the intensely erotic poems of Livesay's middle-age, framed by The Unquiet Bed (1967) and Disasters of the Sun (1971). Chapter 4 examines the resolution of these conflicts in the later poetry, starting with Ice Age (1975) and receiving clearest expression in Feeling the Worlds (1984). Livesay achieves a unified and unambiguous voice when she finds a way to unite her eroticism with her political concerns, and she ultimately succeeds in realizing a clear vision of her role as a woman writer.

Positioned somewhere between literary history and gynocriticism, this thesis proposes. a new way of viewing the years 1840--1880, the forty-year period that the Literary History of Canada charts as a steady, decisive, and necessary movement away from "a world for women"---away, in other words, from early, woman-tainted periodicals like The Literary Garland and toward the incipient "serious fiction" of the yet-unborn Week, itself prefigured by the establishment of the all-male Royal Society of Canada in 1882. By reclaiming instead of ridiculing, and validating instead of devaluing, this study overturns the patriarchal impulse of the Modernist epiteme, advocating instead a gynocentric appreciation of women whose contribution to nineteenth-century Canadian periodical writing cannot be overlooked, either statistically or qualitatively. Towards this goal, the dissertation raises up woman-authored fictions of the female artist figure---female Kunstlerromane---as a viable and revelatory genre of women's writing in nineteenth-century Canada. The topos of the female artist emerges, in the course of four chapters, as a self-consciously fraught site in which tensions of literary agency and critical reception struggle both inside and outside the particular historical moment of an individual work's publication. An introductory section focuses on various interpenetrations of gender and genre, mapping critical responses to the Bildungsroman and Kunstlerroman according to both non-feminist and feminist paradigms and assumptions, and noting the limited attention paid to Canadian texts in these genres. Chapter two outlines how the earliest woman-authored artist fictions published in Canada concerned male rather than female artists, yet worked subversively within a male paradigm. Of interest in this regard are several serialized stories from the 1840s and '50s by Eliza Lanesford Cushing (in The Literary Garland), Mary Eliza Herbert (in her own editorial venture, The Mayflower; or Ladies Acadian Newspaper), and two anonymous---and likely female-authors (in The Mayflower and The Anglo-American Magazine). Chapter three shifts the usual critical focus from Susanna Moodie's Roughing It in the Bush to her little-known serialized novel, "Rachel Wilde; or, Trifles from the Burthen of a Life" (1848). By viewing Moodie in her roles as both writer and editor of The Victoria Magazine, the venue in which "Rachel Wilde" appeared, the chapter explores her polemicization of the embryonic growth of a female artist. Chapter four recuperates Louisa Murray's contribution to post-Confederation Canadian literature by means of her serialized novel "Marguerite Kneller: Artist and Woman," published in 1872 in the first volume of The Canadian Monthly and National Review. By proposing a gendered aesthetics of compromise, and by taking issue, intertextually, with the British literary tradition, this work uncovers the extent to which Murray continued and augmented the literary "sorority" that earlier women like Cushing, Herbert, and Moodie had helped to foster. As writers, as editors, and as creators of a kind of representatively autobiographical agency in their fictions of the female artist, such women made valuable contributions to the heterogeneous project that would become increasingly defined, in the later nineteenth century, as "Canadian literature." The Literary History's damning epithet, "a world for women," thus becomes reconstituted, in the course of this thesis, as a more accurate critical insight. Which is to say, ironically but justifiably much of the world of nineteenth-century periodical fiction in Canada can indeed be considered "a world for women."

The Canadian historical play in English has long been subject to cursory, pejorative evaluation. Though a tradition of common practice has existed, almost unaltered, but still dynamic, since the earliest examples of the genre, there exists no articulated account of that tradition. Indications are that playwrights and critics alike have been largely unaware of the extent to which English-Canadian historical drama evinces a progress within a virtually paradigmatic structure. New developments in English-Canadian historiography suggest that a similar reconsideration of basic critical assumptions would benefit both the practice and the criticism of the English-Canadian history play. Building from a theoretical understanding founded in sociological and interdisciplinary cultural studies of the role of perception in "history" past and present, this study works to articulate a progress within a tradition, to set out the enduringly common features of English-Canadian historical drama. Through analytical commentary on twenty-eight plays, divided into five of the most common topical and thematic foci of the genre, this study establishes the roots of contemporary common practice in the earliest examples of the genre published in the late nineteenth-century, and traces the evolution of that practice through its most significant point of change midway through the twentieth century. The study argues that criticism to date has not fully comprehended the parameters within which the English-Canadian historical play has usually been written. English-Canadian historical playwrights are, in fact, paralleling (sometimes even anticipating) developments in Canadian historiography. Criticism of revisionist elements in the drama generally mistakes a strength for a weakness. Similarly, the omission of the non-Canadian historical subject from virtually all previous studies of the genre is an unnecessary limitation. Finally, and most importantly, the contemporary English-Canadian history play is not about history. Rather, it uses elements of history to critique and reconceive the present. Ironically, the contemporary English-Canadian historical play tends, in its reclamation of figures marginalized in the past, to make heroes out of individuals who were profoundly mistrustful of conventional discourses of heroism. If criticism of the genre has been imperfectly conceived, so too has practice of the form sometimes revealed its own ideological blind spots.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, Canada's comic press developed a complex and extensive pattern of verbal and visual satire drawing on the powerful resonances associated with the idea(l) of Shakespeare. These texts show that Shakespeare had already by the nineteenth century become a significant part of Canadian popular culture. Chapter One investigates the extent to which Shakespeare was a part of popular culture by studying both reverential and confrontational appropriations of his works. Chapter Two takes as its starting point the admission by one of the anonymous writers for Grip that "one cannot help parodying Shakespeare" (27 May 1876, p. 2) and, from there, examines the way re-writings and political parodies interrogate, both implicitly and explicitly, received traditions and assumptions about Shakespeare. In translating Shakespeare into a "Canadian" voice, the occasional periodical pieces adopt the colonizing cultural capital of Shakespeare for Canada. The third chapter explores in close detail the use of Shakespeare in Canadian political caricature. Beyond merely choosing a Shakespearean theme, Canadian caricaturists (chief among them J. W. Bengough) use the reputation and knowledge of Shakespeare among the readers of comic periodicals to make pointed and reformist comments about the politicians and social problems of the day.

My thesis examines the work of Ontario writer Lola Lemire Tostevin: five books of poetry, Color of Her Speech (1982), Gyno-Text (1983), Double Standards (1985), 'sophie (1988) and Cartouches (1995), and her first novel, Frog Moon (1994). Although she writes primarily in English, Tostevin's first language is French; I am primarily interested in how she makes use of this fact in both the form and the content of her writing. In examining this linguistic dynamic, I make some use of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. In emphasizing her linguistic and sexual difference, Tostevin "perverts" the traditionalist, male-centred, English language in which she is a "minor" writer. Reacting to painful divisiveness with a "paradigm of multiplicity," she creates a new range of possibilities able to exist within one country, person, or text.

In the late sixties in Canada, the emerging alternative theatre adapted dramaturgical models, many of them from the international countercultural movement of the period, which served as means of challenging the primacy of the playwright and of creating a new decentralized iconography of the Canadian people. In the process of doing so, however, this theatre left many colonialist practices unexamined, and effectively succeeded in disseminating nationalist or centralizing mythologies of utopian populism. Thus, the suppressive effects of colonialism were ironically prolonged as the new nationalist theatre continued to produce marginalizing effects. This study reframes critical perspectives on contemporary theatrical values and practices in Canada by revisiting the ways in which colonialist representation inscribed subordination and marginality in the first place. Since 1980, there has been a significant subversion and effacement of nationalist ideology by the very groups which had been suppressed by the universalizations of populism. In addition, the adoption by many practitioners of decentred, postmodern textuality combined with experimentation in interdisciplinary techniques has created performance modes more adaptable to cultural reality. In Canadian theatre of the nineties, it has become common practice to historicize unitary narratives of culture and self-identity and to construct, instead, intercultural texts which acknowledge the co-presence of universality and difference, and which assist in drawing spectators with diverse cultural expectations into communal experience.

This study examines the literature written by the generation of women who come between pioneering women writers such as Catharine Parr Traill and Susanna Moodie and contemporary women writers such as Alice Munro and Margaret Laurence, literature which helps us to understand the tradition of New Woman writing present in Canada at the turn of the century. This thesis examines selected texts published between 1895 and 1910, a period of rapid urban and industrial expansion in Canada when women began seeing themselves and their roles in society in "new" ways. The first chapter of this thesis examines the concept of the "New Woman" in terms of its original connotations. The second chapter focuses on the representations of the "New Woman" in Lily Dougall's The Madonna of a Day. Sara Jeannette Duncan's A Daughter of Today is the subject of the third chapter. The final chapter examines short stories written by Canadian women journalists Kit Coleman, Ethelwyn Wetherald, and Jean Blewett. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)

Abstract not available.