<p>John Metcalf has been living and writing in Canada for twenty-five years. During that time he has demonstrated phenomenal energy in editing anthologies and textbooks of Canadian writing, in promoting the work of Canadian writers, in writing perceptive and provocative assessments of the Canadian literary establishment and, most importantly, in making his own significant contribution to literature in this country. And yet ... Critics of Metcalf' s fiction tend to preface their examinations by noting and attempting to explain the relatively small amount of scholarly activity his works have generated. In the burgeoning industry of CanLit, this lack seems indeed remarkable. Reingard Nischik and Barry Cameron attribute it in part to Metcalf 's preference for the short story, which is too often regarded by Canadian readers as a dry run for the novel, rather than a genre in its own right (Nischik, "The Short Story in Canada" 236; Cameron, "An Approximation of Poetry" 17). Robert Leeker writes: "Another reason Metcalf' s stories have been overlooked is that they are, by contemporary standards, relatively traditional in form" (Leeker 59). This, I think, is an important point: because his stories have been perceived as "relatively traditional in form," Metcalf has remained outside, for example, the coterie of Canadian postmodernism (one which he would no doubt be loath to join but within which his work might have been granted a wider field of reception). In The Canadian Postmodern: A Study of Contemporary English-Canadian Fiction (Hutcheon explains in the introduction that "fiction" here means "novel"), Metcalf merits a one-line reference: his two novels are listed in a parenthesis in the Appendix. This despite the fact that a number of his stories comply with the definition of postmodernism Hutcheon outlines. What I intend to argue here is that Metcalf 's stories are by no means exclusively traditional in form, and that many of them employ techniques generally associated with the postmodern.</p> / Thesis / Bachelor of Arts (BA)
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:mcmaster.ca/oai:macsphere.mcmaster.ca:11375/15899 |
| Date | 09 1900 |
| Creators | Wilkshire, Claire Elizabeth |
| Contributors | Hyman, R, English |
| Source Sets | McMaster University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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