This thesis focuses on major twentieth-century native Newfoundland novelists whose legacies comprise a variety of voices and narrative strategies that circumvent or confront perceived cultural and literary authority. These novelists include, in chapter one, Anastasia English (1862-1959) and Margaret Duley (1894-1968); in chapter two, Harold Horwood (1923) and Percy Janes (1922); in chapter three, M. T. Dohaney (1930) and William Gough (1945); and in chapter four, Gordon Pinsent (1930), William Rowe (1942) and Wayne Johnson (1958). English and Duley are both centrally concerned with women's roles in their societies and in expressing their awakening feminism they develop subtexts of imagery and metaphores which align them with nineteenth-century British women writers. Harold Horwood's frequent disparagement of Newfoundlanders is matched by Percy Jane's depiction of their often self-inflicted violences, yet Horwood pontificates solutions and isolates himself from the people of the island whereas Janes acknowledges his need for their companionship and the necessity of collective change. Dohaney and Gough both emphasize the importance of memory in their characterizations of the Newfoundlander's psyche. They suggest that memory functions to overcome both the geography of Newfoundland, which dispassionately destroys its inhabitants' creative work, and the history of Newfoundland which is determined in large parts by events and interpretations of those events occurring beyond the Newfoundlander's control. Pinsent, Rowe and Johnson use humourous texts to convey the anguish Newfoundlanders feel regarding religious, political and industrial powers imposed by foreign cultures over them. Their texts demonstrate the wide-spread use of self-mockery by Newfoundlanders, which diminishes self-esteem and self-reliance in the province. All of the novelists assembled in this study indicate that the construction of stories may establish a personal mythology and power enabling the architect to survive geographic, cultural and personal domination.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:uottawa.ca/oai:ruor.uottawa.ca:10393/6790 |
| Date | January 1993 |
| Creators | Strong, Joan M. |
| Contributors | Moss, John, |
| Publisher | University of Ottawa (Canada) |
| Source Sets | Université d’Ottawa |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | 240 p. |
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