The work is a study of poetry in Scotland and Canada in the period 1860-1930, with a special emphasis on the influence of nationalism. A discussion of the problems of literary nationalism in both countries is followed by a survey of national verse anthologies which illustrates the extent to which editors allowed their critical judgment to be coloured by the popular image of the national character. The importance of the Scottish vernacular and the Canadian wilderness to the establishment of a sense of national identity are considered in relation to a general discussion of language and nationalism. Two important elements in this discussion are the role of the untutored poet as a natural spokesman for his country and the swing from conservative poetic diction to a freer use of colloquial language during this period, and this portion of the thesis contains a survey of representative Scottish and Canadian poets. There is also a comparison of the difficulty of establishing an appropriate mode of expression in a new country with the problems encountered by Scots whose traditional way of life was being disrupted by the industrialization and urbanization of their society. The study concludes with a comparison of the two poets, E.J. Pratt and Hugh MacDiarmid, whose work marks a transition from poetic conservatism to the experimentation characteristic of many twentieth century writers. Finally, it is argued that although poets and critics lamented the failures of publishers and readers to support national poetry, there was considerable enthusiasm for local poetry in Scotland and Canada. It is maintained, however, that there was too clear a popular image of the Canadian or Scottish character, and that this prevented many poets from rising above mediocrity.

This essay examines the interstices between geography and history in English Canadian poetry by analyzing the production of space through poetic imagery. It introduces two terms, "garrison temporality" and "geologic temporality," to demonstrate how poets created divisions in the Canadian landscape temporally, demarcating these divisions according to their understanding of the perceived spaces' historicity. In early Canadian poetry, poets tended to distinguish colonized spaces from uncolonized spaces by designating them as either historical or ahistorical. This was achieved, more specifically, by appropriating civil, or garrison, spaces into a narrative of English expansion which traced its historical lineage back to European antiquity. The space outside the garrison's perimeter was deemed to exist out of time, providing yet another justification for further colonization. Later generations of Canadian poets contested the ahistorical designations created by this narrative, as well as the division they draw between urban and non-urban spaces, by appealing to geologic time. Geologic temporality functions not so much as a viable explanatory model for the narration of history as it does a poetic device for contesting the centrality of Europe and of urban centers in assessing contemporary Canada's place in time. This essay traces the shift in attitudes towards time and space from Charles G.D. Roberts' "Tantramar Revisited" (1886) to Dale Zieroth's "Baptism" (1981). / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

This study explores the ways contemporary English-Canadian elegists transform rituals of mourning in order to accommodate a broader set of losses than has been permitted by the conventions of elegiac tradition. Focusing on the poetry of Jordan Abel, Stephanie Bolster, Anne Carson, Anne Simpson, and Souvankham Thammavongsa, I explore the ways these elegists make use of unconventional translation practices — that is, translation practices that privilege creativity, process, and transformation rather than mimetic transfers of information — to capture the incommensurability of grief. By exploiting the transformative power of translation, these elegists use unconventional translation practices to create a version of elegy that shifts attention from elegy as product to elegy as enactment. These works find value in the ongoing process of lamentation rather than in the cessation of mourning that characterized pastoral elegy and has become understood as paradigmatic of elegy more broadly. For the elegiac works I discuss in this dissertation, translation functions as both a metaphor and a tool to deal with the dilemmas presented by mourning in the context of a new global reality characterized by unbridgeable geo-temporal distances and community fragmentation. Each chapter of this dissertation explores the way that the transformation of elegiac ritual occurs in the context of a particular kind of loss by analyzing one or two representative texts. Chapter One reads Anne Carson’s Nox as an example of the familial elegy in the context of community fragmentation, examining the ways that Carson’s abundant, amplificatory translation of Catullus’s “Poem 101” allows for the creation of an elegy that grapples with geo-temporal distances through the creation of an elegiac ritual that acts as a stand in for the funeral. Chapter Two considers Souvankham Thammavongsa’s Found as an example of the postmemorial elegy, arguing that the combination of found poetry and ekphrasis allows for the creation of an elegiac ritual that facilitates acceptance but is limited by a desire to protect both the elegist’s own privacy and the privacy of her father. Chapter Three analyzes Nisga’a poet Jordan Abel’s The Place of Scraps, arguing that the use of erasure in this text allows for the creation of an elegy that politicizes grief by challenging the subjects that are considered worthy of elegy and actively working toward the reclamation of identity through a rewriting of accepted colonial collective myths. Chapter Four pairs Anne Simpson’s “Seven Paintings by Brueghel” and Stephanie Bolster’s Long Exposure in order to consider the ways that the contemporary phenomenon of mediatized trauma can be mourned through ekphrastic elegies as well as the ways these works push the contemporary elegy to its limits by exploring the ethics of witnessing. By reading this group of elegies in the context of the history of the English elegy and through the lens of translation, I argue that these elegists open the field of elegy to voices that have frequently been excluded and challenge our understanding of readers as participants in elegiac community.

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Thesis (M.A.)--University of New Brunswick, 1999. / Includes bibliographical references.

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II y a trois hypotheses de travail a l'origine de notre etude: les mouvements de poesie moderne au Canada et au Quebec suiverit une evolution parallele de 1920-25 a 1950-55; Montreal est le lieu central, la ville-carrefour ou se produit l'eclosion des deux mouvements poeti-ques; enfin des analyses comparees des oeuvres des poetes quebecois et canadiens representatifs des annees 30 et 40 devraient prouver que leurs textes sont marques par des themes, des questions de fond, une proble-matique qui leur est commune.. Poursuivant dans la lignee des travaux des professeurs Ronald Sutherland, D.G. Jones, Clement Moisan, Jean-Charles Falardeau et Antoine Sirois, nous avons verifie ces hypotheses en nous servant de la discipline du comparatisme litteraire et en l'ap-pliquant a un nouveau champ de recherche, les litteratures quebecoise et canadienne. La premiere partie de notre etude (six chapitres) se veut un essai d'histoire litteraire comparee de la naissance et de l'epanouis-sement des deux mouvements poetiques modernes a Montreal dans les decen— nies 1920, 1930, 1940 et 1950. Nous avons analyse la formation des mouvements litteraires et la teneur de leur programme, 1'evolution et l'alternance des ecoles de theorie poetique, les regroupements de poetes autour de revues et de maisons d1edition specialisees, la parution de recueils de poemes marquants, d'anthologies et de livres de critique influents. Les cinq chapitres de la deuxieme partie portent sur des questions de contenu de quelque quatre-vingt recueils ecrits par vingt-trois poetes quebecois et canadiens: des membres de l'Ecole de McGill (A.J.M. Smith, F.R. Scott, Leo Kennedy, A.M. Klein) et de certains inde-pendants (E.J. Pratt, Dorothy Livesay) dans les annees 20 et 30 a. des representants des groupes de Preview (Patrick Anderson, P.K. Page) et de First Statement (Louis Dudek, Irving Layton) durant la guerre 1939-45 et 1'apres-guerre; des poetes des annees 30 Robert Choquette, Alfred DesRochers, Jean Narrache, Clement Marchand au groupe de poetes femi-nins (Medje Vezina, Simone Routier), aux "grands axnes" Saint-Denys Garneau, Grandbois, Francois Hertel, Anne Hebert et jusqu'aux devanciers de ljHexagone (Gilles Henault, Paul-Marie Lapointe, Roland Giguere). Meme si l'accent n'est pas toujours mis sur les memes themes par les poetes quebecois et canadiens, nos etudes de thematique comparee tendent a demontrer qu'abien des points de vue les deux groupes de poetes montrealais sont preoccupes par des problemes semblables dans les annees 30 et 40, que leurs textes donnent generalement lieu a "une poesie de dissidence". Nous avons releve une dissidence sociale et politique chez les poetes temoins de la crise economique qui decriverit les "soirs rouges" de Montreal dans des oeuvres contestataires et revendicatrices. Les poetes du temps de la guerre et de 1'apres-guerre annoncent un change-ment radical, une transformation en profondeur des societes quebecoise et canadienne. La periode de 1'entre-deux-guerres voit la naissance d'une veine philosophique et metaphysique qui se situe en marge du contexte socio-politique du temps de la crise, une "poesie d'exil et d'alienation". Enfin nos chapitres portant sur "le pays" et "la tentation de l'eros" mettent en vedette des poetes et des themes qui, comme par un phenomene de compensation, tentent deliberement d'oublier les effets de la grande depression et du chaos de la guerre. Deux ecoles de critique litteraire, d'origine europeenne mais bien implantees au Canada et au Quebec, ont fourni les outils methodo-logiques de notre etude: la critique thematique, qui s'est deja acquis une solide reputation avec des representants comme Northrop Frye, George Woodcock, D.G. Jones et Gilles Marcotte, Jacques Blais, Andre Brochu; la critique sociologique qui compte de fervents adeptes chez les critiques et/ou historiens de la litterature Ronald Sutherland, Peter Stevens, Louis Dudek, Jean-Charles Falardeau et Antoine Sirois. En appliquant les methodes d'investigation et d'analyse de ces deux ecoles de critique aux mouvements, aux poetes, aux textes quebecois et canadiens modernes, nous poursuivons un double objectif: demontrer que la litterature comparee canadienne et quebecoise est un champ de recherche pro-metteur et par le fait meme encourager la production d'autres travaux dans ce domaine. / Arts, Faculty of / French, Hispanic, and Italian Studies, Department of / Graduate

What is metaphor and how do we learn to think analogically? Education by Metaphor explores these questions from two perspectives: poetics and curriculum theorizing. Through this discursive inquiry, I develop arguments and hypotheses on the origins, mechanics, and educative possibilities of metaphor, often by drawing from Zwicky’s philosophical work and interviews I conducted with six Canadian writers. I sought conversations with these writers because the works they publish display deft and provocative analogical play. I wanted to know what they know about metaphor, and how they came to know such things, and how these ideas inform their critical, artistic, and pedagogical practices. I also asked for their thoughts on particular discursive conflicts and metaphoric models, and I asked them about their curricular experiences, both formal and otherwise. Excerpts from these transcripts are interwoven throughout the manuscript, according to their connections with the topics at hand. The first chapter of this dissertation traces metaphor’s discursive history and delineates its conflict with philosophy. From that foundation, I critique contemporary models for metaphor that stem from Black’s and Richards’ theorizing; after explaining why they are ill-suited to poetic terrain, I develop a less reductive model. Much of this work informs subsequent chapters, hence its preliminary positioning. In the second chapter I approach metaphor anthropologically and advance hypotheses for how we, as a species, might have come to think metaphorically. These hypotheses emphasize empathy and anthropomorphism, two important notions nested within the inner-workings of analogical thought. In turn, these hypotheses inform the third chapter’s explorations of poetic and ontological attention. This theoretical work reveals concepts integrally related to metaphor’s emergence, for example aesthetic experience, defamiliarization, and the interplay of pattern and anomaly. In the fourth chapter, I revisit these concepts from a more empirical perspective and use comments from my interviewees to illuminate intersections amongst play, pedagogy, and analogical thought. Lastly, the fifth chapter asks, what good is the study of metaphor? I respond to this question by addressing metaphor’s imaginative, ethical, and educational consequences. / Thesis (Ph.D, Education) -- Queen's University, 2013-02-19 12:13:38.213

For years, critics have used Black writers' interweaving of African-derived oral textual features and European written forms to reject the concept of the Great Divide between orality and writing in literacy studies. These critics primarily see the hybridized texts of writers of African descent as a model that assists in the complex union of writing and orality. My argument is that the integrationist model is not the only way, perhaps not even the most fruitful way, to read the hybridized texts of writers of African descent. I develop a reading of Anglophone African, African-Caribbean, and African-Canadian literature that sees the synthesis of orality and writing as an emergent discourse, free of the dogmatisms of textuality and of colonial literary standards, that contributes to the cultural and political aspirations of writers of African descent. In transcribing African-derived orality into writing, Black writers emphasize the ethnic component of their African identity, thereby decolonizing their literature. Consequently, the literature functions as locus or epitome of community-created culture and counter-colonial discourse, portraying the Black writer as a self-assertive community agent with the potential for forging a new historically informed identity. My introduction identifies the scope of the study, defining what constitutes African-derived oral textual features and outlining the critical theories that will be instrumental to my analysis. I also explain why I selected the writers Wole Soyinka (African), Edward Kamau Brathwaite, Louise Bennett (African-Caribbean), Lillian Allen, Marlene Nourbese Philip, and Clifton Joseph (African-Canadian) as examples of writers who have utilized orality in writing as political and cultural expression. Chapter One provides a background to pre-colonial African oral discourse. Chapters Two, Three, and Four respectively focus on Anglophone African, African Caribbean, and African Canadian poets' uses of orality in writing to reflect an eclectic cultural heritage. A brief conclusion follows these chapters. It reaffirms my primary thesis that the dynamic union of orality and writing in Anglophone African, African-Caribbean, and African-Canadian written poetry functions as the expression of a new kind of cultural and political discourse, in search of a new audience and a critical approach that requires both Africanist and European critical perspectives.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Saskatchewan, 1999. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves [184]-198). Also available on the Internet. MODE OF ACCESS via web browser by entering the following URL: http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk1/tape9/PQDD%5F0027/NQ37868.pdf.