This thesis participates in a reconsideration of English-Canadian literary critical history through a reading of the critical construction of Sheila Watson's novel, The Double Hook. The thesis examines the rhetoric by which Watson's novel has been read as central to and representative of Canada's literary cultural maturity. That maturity has been measured by such modernist formal principles as the objective correlative and the mythical method, formalist standards and tastes valorized by New Criticism and by the synchronic mythographies of Freudian psychoanalysis, structuralist anthropology, and structuralist literary criticism (such as Frye's mythopoeics). The thesis argues that a structural mechanism of sacrifice is central to the literary critical narrative about this novel; that the myth-making by which violence becomes sacred and thereby marks the establishment, redemption, or survival of culture, is founded specifically on the sacrifice of women in The Double Hook.

This thesis examines the significant role of expressionist and minimalist visual aesthetics in the construction (imagery, structuring, language) and subsequent interpretation of Sheila Watson's The Double Hook. While Sherrill Grace's Regression & Apocalypse the groundwork for a literary expressionist reading of Watson's novel, this study elaborates the crucial links between literary and painterly expressionism in the novel and suggests Watson's critique of the expressionist aesthetic. A reading of the minimalist aesthetic, as both an extension of and an alternative to the expressionist reading of the text, emphasizes the relevance of noniconic painterly strategies to the novel and, by implication, of alternate forms of spectatorship that are demanded by the text. This study ultimately shows how Watson creatively synthesizes these extremes of modernist visual aesthetics and asks for the reader's imaginative and critical engagement with the modernist arts.

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