One of the key characteristics of the comic discourse of parody is a complex double-structuredness that allows it to inscribe a sense of difference at the heart of the similarities often informing constructions of literary traditions and cultural continuities. Parody is, to use Mikhail Bakhtin's terms, a vari-directional double-voiced discourse that simultaneously draws on a reader's familiarity with textual and discursive antecedents while at the same time encouraging a dialectical reconsideration of the appropriateness and relevance of those models in light of the cultural milieu into which such models were imported. Victorian Canada was a culture defined by such a period of transition. Dedicated to inscribing a sense of common heritage with Old World traditions, most writers and thinkers in Victorian Canada aimed for the creation of a unifying national culture that they believed could distinctively and appropriately represent. Canada to itself in terms of familiar Old World conventions. Such key concepts as land and landedness, and such vital activities as reading and writing, came to be defined within such arguments according to Old World codes and standards. For prominent Canadian fiction writers of the nineteenth century, parody was understood as an appropriate discourse for exploring more fully both the aspirations and anxieties burdening an emerging nation struggling toward cultural self-definition. Avoiding a monologic transplantation of Old World textual models or cultural presumptions, these writers, while acknowledging the acceptance and appeal of such Old World benchmarks within a still nascent culture, challenge their contemporaries to reconsider this inhibitive reliance on textual and discursive structures imported from other places and other times. They encourage an imaginative exploration of other ways of representing Canada's distinctiveness, insistently laying bare the limitations inherent in a naive confidence in the portability of literary conventions and cultural presumptions. Including as part of their own narratives the very structures they set out to question, Canadian parodists emphasize how identity is the product of testing rather than accepting preestablished imaginative and literary boundaries. The rise to prominence of Stephen Leacock in the early decades of this century signals both an epistemic shift in Canada and a radical transformation of this country's parodic spirit. Moving in his parodies toward a more transnational vision of Canada and Canadian concerns, Leacock at the same time recognizes in the parodic a vital source of kindliness. Whereas parody is for his Victorian counterparts a strategy for defining and nurturing a sense of distinctly Canadian culture, for Leacock it becomes vitally allied to survival in a world of crumbling foundations.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:uottawa.ca/oai:ruor.uottawa.ca:10393/4110 |
| Date | January 1998 |
| Creators | Dyer, Klay. |
| Contributors | Staines, D., |
| Publisher | University of Ottawa (Canada) |
| Source Sets | Université d’Ottawa |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | 278 p. |
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