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published_or_final_version / English / Master / Master of Philosophy

The marriage of English and French in nineteenth-century English-Canadian fiction is a trope reflecting anglophone nationalism and the anglophone desire for identity in a united nation. / The marriage metaphor can be understood within the conservative, idealistic context of nineteenth-century Anglo-Canadian intellectual history. / This study examines marriage imagery in a number of novels--most of them historical romances--published between 1824 and 1899.

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In this study of narration, feminist theory, and grotesque Canadian fiction, my aim is to provide a narrative model with which to read characters portrayed as both female and monstrous in a way that criticism on the grotesque does not. I provide two systems for the methodology of this study: via negativa, a well-established philosophical system of definition by negation, which shows the strength of the grotesque to represent a subject that is inherently paradoxical; and a narrative model called the "middle voice," which I developed to examine narratives that confuse or render ambiguous the identity of subjects. Through these distinct but complementary frameworks I illustrate a literary phenomenon in fiction of the grotesque: that authors develop and reveal the subjectivity of characters by confounding identities. / Although I provide a concise definition of the term "grotesque," my focus is on feminist theoretical approaches to the grotesque. However, whereas feminist theory on the grotesque examines the binary opposition of woman to man, this study shows that the grotesque bypasses the "male/female" dichotomy in the representation of fictional characters. Instead, the sustained contradiction of the central opposition "woman/monster" works to undermine the notion of fictional characterization. / Specifically, this study focuses on the grotesque as a narrative strategy and examines the use of the grotesque in the portrayal of female narrators. The prevalence of female grotesque characters in recent Canadian fiction combined with the rapid growth of interest in the critical concept of the "female grotesque" requires a theoretical analysis of the literature. / In the fiction I examine by Canadian authors Margaret Atwood, Lynn Coady, Barbara Gowdy, Alice Munro, and Miriam Toews, narrators are contradictory. As subjects, they have doubled identities. Authors situate identity ("subjectivity") in the realm of paradox, rather than in the realm of clarity and resolution. As a result, readers and critics must rely on ambiguity and subversion as guides when posing the ultimately irresolvable question "who is speaking?" Through analysis of this fiction, then, I argue for nothing short of a new conceptualization of subjectivity.

This dissertation offers the first comprehensive examination of realism in English-Canadian fiction of the early twentieth century. It argues for the existence of a "modern-realist" movement that is Canada's unique and unacknowledged contribution to the collection of international movements that makes up literary modernism. This argument involves a detailed analysis of the aesthetics, aims, preoccupations, and techniques of the modern realists, a reexamination of the oeuvres of the movement's most prominent writers, and a critical reevaluation of the "modernity" of Canada's three most significant realist sub-genres—prairie realism, urban realism, and social realism. This study also provides a literary-historical overview of the movement as a whole, which begins with the inauguration of the Canadian Bookman in 1919, and concludes with the emergence of a contemporary Canadian fiction in the 1950s. The conclusions arrived at in this work are based upon a reading of dozens of novels and works of short fiction, many of them unpublished and/or critically neglected and forgotten. The findings in this study are also based on original research into archival materials from seven institutions across Canada.

From its earliest beginning in Frances Brooke’s The History of Emily Montague, set in Canada and published in 1769, women have been prominent in Canadian literature. Since that time, a very large number of Canadian novels written by both men and women have been primarily concerned with a female character. In this thesis, an attempt has been made to determine to what extent an author's fictional world view and characterization is influenced by his sex; the area was narrowed to that of the Canadian novel in the period of approximately 1950-1965. Novels by Brian Moore, Sinclair Ross, Hugh MacLennan, Morley Callaghan, Adele Wiseman, Sheila Watson, Ethel Wilson, and Margaret Laurence were chosen as the main objects of the study. A recurrent theme emerged during the study of these novels; many of the authors appeared deeply concerned with the problem of personal and social isolation, and concluded that evil and fear, compassion and love neither originate outside the self nor remain confined to it. The metaphor used to characterize the fear-based isolation was often that of the wilderness, which might be internal, external, or both. A final conclusion about these novels, which are almost all based primarily on female characters, is that the ones created by women are generally more interesting and convincing. The male novelists tend to emphasize the sexual roles played by their female protagonists, while the women authors have a stronger tendency to write about women as people whose sexuality is important, but whose total personality is not constituted by this one aspect. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

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