The ironic mode is currently a popular style of writing, as seen in the works being produced in the Maritimes. Three current Maritime writers who use this mode are Donna Smyth, David Adams Richards and Deborah Joy Corey. Though the works of these writers appear to be different from earlier pieces of Maritime writing, I suggest that this is not necessarily the case. These three writers are all concerned with the loss of tradition and community strength. I will show this through their treatment of the young women in their works, through their relationships with their partners, their elders, and the community at large. I also suggest that these works do, in fact, have strong ties with earlier writings. The women in these novels are ironic versions of Anne Shirley, L.M. Montgomery's beloved heroine. The romance of Anne may have turned into irony, but the young girl who tries to find a place for herself and her creativity in a rural Maritime region is still present. By comparing the similar events in the works of the late Twentieth Century and the Anne novels, I will show that, though Maritime writing is diverse, there is an interconnectedness in the writings produced from this region, regardless of the age. This allows for a universality in these various works that needs to be recognized as a significant contribution to Canadian--and world--literature. / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA)

La mer a d’abord été un espace géographique bien réel dans la vie de Chateaubriand, l’immense champ libre accordé à son enfance. En ouvrant le monde grand large devant son regard, la mer autorisait une manière singulière d’en prendre possession. L’auteur des Mémoires d’outre-tombe se revendique navigateur, découvreur, voyageur. Il utilise spontanément le vocabulaire des matelots. Pourtant, il n’a vécu au bord de la mer que sept années pendant l’enfance, n’a effectué ensuite que des escales brèves, sous des cieux étrangers. Il se réfère malgré tout à la mer à chaque instant, la réinstalle sans cesse dans un texte avec lequel d’innombrables correspondances finissent par s’établir. L’écriture elle-même épouse le rythme de la mer, ses harmonies variables. On croit toujours entendre au loin comme le roulement des vagues, comme le bruit du ressac. Tout se passe comme si la sensibilité et l’imagination de l’écrivain, demeurées marquées par une sorte de paysage originel, lisaient le monde à travers un filtre, et lui conféraient instinctivement les teintes, les arrière-plans propres aux rivages quittés. Chateaubriand se demandait avec anxiété si les Mémoires resteraient lisibles à la postérité. Mais l’écriture et la mer renvoient à une même conception de l’éternité : elles écrivent en lettres temporaires des chants qui durent toujours / The sea was first a real geographical space in Chateaubriand’s life, the boundless playing field of his childhood. By unfurling the world at large under his gaze, the sea provided him with a singular mode of appropriating it. The author of the Mémoires d’outre-tombe claimed for himself the status of seaman, discoverer, and traveller. The maritime lexicon comes to him spontaneously. While he only spent seven years of his childhood by the sea, then subsequently stopped but briefly in foreign port of calls, he keeps on referring time and again to the sea, and incessantly reinstates it in his texts, thus elaborating a rich netwwork of echoes. His very style evokes the rhythm of the sea and its ever-changing harmonics. The reader always seems to hear resounding waves and backwash in the distance. It is as if the writer’s sensibility and imagination, bearing the stamp of a foundational landscape, had him perceive the world through the shades and against the backdrops peculiar to the shores he left. Chateaubriand anxiously wondered whether the Mémoires would remain readable to his posterity. But writing and the sea conjure up the same idea of eternity : they write in labile script everlasting songs