This thesis participates in a reconsideration of English-Canadian literary critical history through a reading of the critical construction of Sheila Watson's novel, The Double Hook. The thesis examines the rhetoric by which Watson's novel has been read as central to and representative of Canada's literary cultural maturity. That maturity has been measured by such modernist formal principles as the objective correlative and the mythical method, formalist standards and tastes valorized by New Criticism and by the synchronic mythographies of Freudian psychoanalysis, structuralist anthropology, and structuralist literary criticism (such as Frye's mythopoeics). The thesis argues that a structural mechanism of sacrifice is central to the literary critical narrative about this novel; that the myth-making by which violence becomes sacred and thereby marks the establishment, redemption, or survival of culture, is founded specifically on the sacrifice of women in The Double Hook.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.28509 |
| Date | January 1994 |
| Creators | Pennee, Donna |
| 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 | Doctor of Philosophy (Department of English.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 001425659, proquestno: NN00122, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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