'"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. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UBC/oai:circle.library.ubc.ca:2429/13301 |
| Date | 11 1900 |
| Creators | Cabajsky, Andrea |
| Source Sets | University of British Columbia |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text, Thesis/Dissertation |
| Format | 9662842 bytes, application/pdf |
| Rights | For non-commercial purposes only, such as research, private study and education. Additional conditions apply, see Terms of Use https://open.library.ubc.ca/terms_of_use. |
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