Summary of Thesis (Ph. D.)--Vanderbilt University, 1937. / "Private edition, distributed by the Joint university libraries, Nashville, Tennessee."

Thesis (M.A.)--Ohio University, June, 2003. / Title from PDF t.p.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2006. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

Modern biographies of William Shakespeare abound: new studies appear almost every year, each claiming new research and new insights, while affirming that there are enough records for a documentary life. In this thesis, I argue that no biography of Shakespeare is possible due to insufficient material, that most of what is written about Shakespeare cannot be verified from primary sources, and that Shakespearean biography did not attain scholarly or academic respectability until Samuel Schoenbaum’s Documentary Life (1975). The thesis therefore is concerned with demythologising Shakespeare by exposing numerous “biogra-fictions.” I begin by reviewing the history and practice of biography as a narrative account of a person’s life based on primary sources. Next I assess the very limited biographical material for Shakespeare identifying the gaps, e.g. there is no record that he spent any of his childhood in Stratford or ever attended school. A historical review of writing about Shakespeare demonstrates that there were no serious attempts to reconstruct his life during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, merely some comments and unverifiable anecdotes. I demonstrate that the greatest Shakespearean scholar, Edmond Malone, realised that no narrative account of Shakespeare’s life was possible. I show how the earliest biographies of Shakespeare emerged in the 1840s in line with the Victorian need to identify national heroes. Schoenbaum’s deeply flawed study has greatly influenced academics who have followed his structure and myths in their own biographies. My analysis of the contrasting descriptions of Shakespeare’s relationships with Southampton and with Jonson demonstrate that the very limited biographical material can only be expanded through speculation and inference. Finally, I propose that study of Shakespeare’s life should be confined to discrete topics, starting from a sceptical examination of primary sources. Any attempt at an account of his life or personality amounts, however, merely to “biografiction”.

Since the mid-1980s, the study of Canadian postmodern historical fiction has been dominated by Linda Hutcheon’s “historiographic metafiction.” Emphasizing historiography and textuality, critics of historiographic metafiction have flattened the past to text and image, inadvertently severing its active connection with the present and removing it from historical process. This is problematic for the ideological intentions of the texts in question because it is an awareness of the past/present dialectic that incites awareness that present action can lead to future change. This thesis, therefore, examines three novels that have overwhelmingly been viewed as historiographic metafiction for their inclusion of researcher-historian characters: Findley’s The Wars, Bowering’s Burning Water, and Marlatt’s Ana Historic. By opening up these texts to criticism that acknowledges history as process, I demonstrate that there is no need to limit these novels to this problematic framework and that researcher-historian characters are valuable for more than their foregrounding of historiography.

The Secret Society of Montreal Oculists 1. Our earliest records of their activities date back to the spring of 1898 with the birth of Lambert. Coincidentally, that spring saw the most destructive flood the settlement had ever known. Lambert was immediately inducted into the Society by his mother, Mme Lepage, who practiced capnomancy and kept a pair of female Dobermans in the basement of the family home. On May 10th, 1994, when Lambert was five years old and despite his mother’s recommendations, he opened his eyes during the solar eclipse, burning them instantly. From the smoke, Mme Lepage divined a future flood that would engulf the mountain. 2. A narrative device. 3. LE GRAND SALON, wherein the Society ritualistically performed Lambert’s demise at each partial solar eclipse, staring at the skies until they could see no more. Presented here is the facsimile of such a ritual, including an Oculists statuary.

One can compare Guthrie's fiction with a sampling of the primary source material, to determine in general his degree of historical accuracy. Then one can compare Guthrie's interpretation with the interpretations of some widely read historiographers, to determine points of agreement or divergence. Finally, Guthrie's interpretation of history can be studied in relation to the themes he develops in his fiction.

In this thesis, I analyse four historical fiction novels as recharacterizations of Elizabeth I’s agency, to argue for the merit of fictionalized narratives of history. These narratives address the conflict between Elizabeth’s political and natural bodies, which I investigate in view of Ernst Kantorowicz’s concept of kingship, while emphasizing her learned experience and perseverance as responsible for her success. In doing so, historical fiction novels represent the motivations of the contemporary author and reader while also asserting the agency and capability of female rulers like Elizabeth, retroactively. In her own time, Elizabeth’s female body was a point of contention in patriarchal England, and early modern authors highlighted her chastity to represent the queen as beyond the rest of humanity, particularly women. In this thesis, I assess how contemporary authors respond to such history, to represent Elizabeth as a fallible woman in a novel way. Elizabeth’s fallibility in these texts represents the capabilities of women in power, credited to their female experience rather than the supernatural status or divine appointment of the early modern ruler. While there is a breadth of research available pertaining to historical depictions of Elizabeth, fewer critics focus upon contemporary accounts. Elizabeth’s legacy in film is represented in such research, but few critics have analysed her presence in historical fiction, though she is a popular heroine of the genre. This thesis examines the prioritization of Elizabeth’s female body in her youth in Robin Maxwell’s Virgin: Prelude to the Throne (2001), her experiences as an unwed queen in Alison Weir’s The Marriage Game (2014) and Susan Kay’s Legacy (1985), and her role as a mother figure in Anne Clinard-Barnhill’s Queen Elizabeth’s Daughter (2014). These authors assert Elizabeth’s agency and demonstrate the value of historical fiction as a genre, rewriting history to reflect female experience as an asset. / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA) / In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, authors depicted Elizabeth I as an extraordinary ruler appointed by God and an extraordinarily chaste woman. Such authors acknowledge Elizabeth’s flawed, natural body, as mortal and female, but praise her incomparable chastity as surpassing other women and ensuring a strong political body or government. While contemporary fiction authors also assess a separation between the political and private, they prioritize individual interiority and female capability as they construct Elizabeth’s navigation of a patriarchal court as a woman in power. This thesis investigates historical fiction, in four novels, as a valuable space for authors to rewrite the agency of Elizabeth I through narratives in which she demonstrates her own decision making and emotional complexity. In this thesis, I assess agency in Robin Maxwell’s Virgin: Prelude to the Throne (2001), Alison Weir’s The Marriage Game (2014), Susan Kay’s Legacy, and Anne Clinard Barnhill’s Queen Elizabeth’s Daughter (2014).

'"Transcolonial Circuits': Historical Fiction and National Identities in Ireland, Scotland, and Canada" explores the intersections between gender, canon-formation, and literary genre in order to argue that English- and French-Canadian historical fiction was influenced, both in form and content, by the precedent-setting fictions o f Scotland and Ireland in the early nineteenth century. Conceived in the spirit o f Katie Trumpener's Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (1997), this dissertation extends Trumpener's examination of nineteenth-century British and Canadian romantic fiction by exploring in greater detail the flow of ideas and literary techniques between Ireland, Scotland, and English and French Canada. It does so in order to revise critical understandings of the formal and thematic origins and development of Canadian historical fiction from the nineteenth century to the present. Chapter One functions as a series of literary snapshots that examine historically the critical and popular reception of novels by Maria Edgeworth and Sydney Owenson in Ireland, Sir Walter Scott in Scotland, John Richardson, William Kirby, and Jean Mcllwraith in English Canada, and Philippe Aubert de Gaspe and Napoleon Bourassa in French Canada. I pay particular attention to the issues o f gender and political ideology as inseparable from the history of the novel itself. In Chapter Two, by focussing on the travel trope, I examine in detail how Irish, Scottish, and Canadian writers transformed the investigative journeys of Samuel Johnson and Arthur Young into journeys of resistance to the dictates of the metropolis. Chapter Three focuses on the complications of marriage as a metaphor o f intercultural union. It pays particular attention to the intersections between gender, sexuality, and colonial identity. The Conclusion extends the concerns raised in the thesis about the relationship between historical writing and national identity to the late-twentieth-century Canadian context, by examining the adaptation of literary and historiographical conventions to the medium of television in the CBC/SRC television series Canada: A People's History, which aired in 2001-02.

This dissertation examines how postmodernist narratives of memory in Graham Swift's Waterland, Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, and Amitav Ghosh's The Shadow Lines retrieve the stories of those who have been lost or forgotten in official history and refigure the temporal and spatial imaginary in intertwining personal stories of crisis with public history through acts of remembering. Questioning the modernist ideology of progress based on the idea of linear sequence of time, the novels not only retrace the heterogeneous and discontinuous layers of stories overlooked or repressed in official accounts of modern history, but also re-examine the contradictory and contested process by which subjects are situated or positioned, and its effects on the production of knowledge. These postmodern historical novels examine history as a discourse and explore its limits. The narrators of the novels are engaged with an autobiographical act of rewriting their lives, but their efforts to reconstitute themselves in unity and continuity are undermined by the disjunctive narrative form of the novels. The layered narrative of memory through which the novels reconstruct modern history is allegorical in the double sense that it exposes the act of signification by decentering the symbol of the transcendental signifier while telling an allegorical story of personal and familial history that mirrors national history in a fragmented way. In Waterland, Tom Crick retells his personal and familial stories intertwined with local and national history as alternative history lessons and challenges the Idea of Progress by revisiting sites of traumatic memory. Midnight's Children constructs counter-stories of Post-Independence India as multiple alternatives to one official version of history and addresses the limits of history in terms of "a border zone of temporality." In The Shadow Lines, the narrator retells his family history as a story of borders through his struggle with gaps in official history and creates a national imaginary with mirror images and events. The postmodernist narrative of memory in these novels turns the time of the now into a time for the "past as to come," a time to detect the unrealized and unfulfilled possibilities of the past, through retellings of the past.