Most inquiries into the nature of literary value have focused on how the academy shapes literary taste and determines the reputation of individual authors. This thesis examines how ideas of literary canon can impact a writer at the creative level. Michael Ondaatje's interest in the cultural significance of authorship makes him ideal for this topic of study. The first essay discusses how Ondaatje's repeated quotation of his own texts can be viewed as a metafictional commentary on the anxieties of literary innovation. It shows how the idea of literary influence and the author's relationship to the canon can be embodied as a formal and thematic characteristic of the literary text. The second essay shows how Ondaatje responds to traditional conceptions of the English-Canadian canon as an editor of a national anthology of short fiction. Early national anthologists beginning with E. H. Dewart in his Selections from Canadian Poets (1864) consolidated a set of evaluative criteria that reflected aspects of nineteenth-century English-Canadian nationalism. This essay examines two national anthologies that represent an alternative to this tradition. John Simpson's The Canadian Forget Me Not for MDCCCXXXVII (1837) is a representation of popular nineteenth-century bourgeois literary taste that predates this legitimating rhetoric. Michael Ondaatje's From Ink Lake (1990) renders an ironic commentary on this hundred-year-old legacy of canon formation.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.20440 |
| Date | January 1998 |
| Creators | Lipert, Peter. |
| Contributors | Lecker, Robert (advisor) |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Master of Arts (Department of English.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 001610915, proquestno: MQ43904, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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