The Routledge Concise History of Canadian Literature Contents

Preface xi
Acknowledgements xii
Maps xiv

1 Introduction: First Peoples and the colonial narratives of
Canadian literature 1
Overview 1
First Peoples and founding narratives 1
Negotiating contact 3
Naming culture: colonial interpretation, or, power-knowledge narratives 4
Cultural re-naming and the Indian Act 6
First stories – textualization 7
European colonial historical narratives of conquest and warfare: “settlement” and trade to 1650 9
Multiple theatres of war: Canada and European empires 10
“American” theatres of war 11
Colonial modes of power: the emerging nation after 1812 12
Religious and national differences between upper and lower Canada 13
Louis-Joseph Papineau and the Patriotes 14
William Lyon Mackenzie and radical reforming zeal 14
The Durham Report and Canadian Confederation 15
Countering colonial notions of “progress”: Aboriginal literary resistances 15
George Copway and early indigenous writers in English 16
Performing ethnicity: Pauline Johnson (Tekahionwake) 17
“The two sisters”: the textualized short story as a mediating device 18
The trope of incarceration: Aboriginal protest writing in the twentieth century 19
Conclusion 20

2 Literatures of landscape and encounter: Canadian Romanticism and
pastoral writing 21
Overview 21
Beginnings of a Canadian canon: Edward Hartley Dewart’s Selections from the Canadian Poets (1864) 21
Charles Sangster, Alexander McLachlan, and Charles Heavysege 24
The Confederation Poets 26
The Confederation Poets and the Canadian landscape 30
Inhabited nature 31
Conclusion 36

3 A new nation: Prose fiction and the rise of the Canadian novel
during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries 38
Overview 38
Double discourse and New World sensibility 38
Strategic sensibility in eighteenth-century female writing 41
The double image: the coquette and resemblance 43
The “re-structuring” of power in French and British Canada 45
New world aesthetics: Major John Richardson’s Wacousta (1832) 46
The “man of feeling” and psychological space 47
The two cultures of Rosanna Leprohon’s Antoinette De Mirecourt (1864) 48
An allegory of decline: William Kirby’s The Golden Dog (1877) 50
Re-defining domesticity: immigration and gender politics in women’s autobiographical settler narratives 51
Redefining domestic space in the writing of Catharine Parr Traill 52
Sketches from the bush: the writing of Susanna Moodie 55
The rise of the Canadian popular novel and the role of the popular press 57
Resemblance and misrecognition in Catherine Beckworth Hart’s St. Ursula’s Convent (1824) 58
The first novel in Quebec: Philippe-Aubert de Gaspé’s The Influence of a Book (1837) 60
From oral to print culture: humour and the picaresque in de Gaspé and Haliburton 61
Historical romance and Les Anciens Canadiens (1863) 62
Sublime community in New France 63
The imperial Idea in the local setting: Sarah Jeanette Duncan’s The Imperialist (1904) 64
Affectionate irony: small town Canada sketched by Stephen Butler Leacock 66
Deconstructing the novel of education: Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables (1908) 68
The speculative worlds of James De Mille: A Strange Manuscript (1888) 69
Container or contained? Narrative interplay in A Strange Manuscript 71
Conclusion 72

4 In Flanders Fields: Gender and social transformation in the First
and Second World Wars 73
Overview 73
The execution or poetics of Canadian war literature: some shared themes 73
The war poetry of John MacCrae and F.G. Scott 74
Discordant voices – In Flanders Fields 77
The competing perspectives of the soldier poets 78
Popular fiction and romance: the war writing of Bertrand William Sinclair 79
The economics of war: societal profit and loss in popular fiction 81
The war machine: redemption and propaganda at a distance 82
Redefining gender performances in Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Rilla of Ingleside (1921) 83
A feminist critique of war: Francis Marion Beynon’s Aleta Dey (1919) 85
The new language of war: absurdism in Charles Yale Harrison’s Generals Die In Bed (1930) 86
Literature of the Second World War: psychology and ethics in the Canadian war novel 89
War as existential void: Colin McDougal’s Execution (1958) 91
Conclusion 93

5 Canadian modernism, 1914–60: “A journey across Canada” 94
Overview 94
Marginal modernism/imagism and the poetic imagination 94
Canadian modernist manifesto writing 95
The garden and the machine in Louise Morey Bowman’s Timepieces (1922) 96
Journeys into modernity: Katherine Hale’s Grey Knitting (1914) and Going North (1923) 97
Imagism in the Canadian poetic imagination: A.J.M. Smith and E.J. Pratt 98
The Montreal Movement: “Ideas are changing” 100
The Canadian authors meet (1927 and 1928) 102
Protest, social observation and ethnicity: “King or chaos” 103
Dorothy Livesay’s aesthetic of commitment 103
The image constellations of P.K. Page 105
Diasporic Intertextuality in the Jewish-Canadian modernism of A.M. Klein 108
The poet’s gaze: Klein’s The Rocking Chair (1948) 111
Canadian modernist prose: a second scroll 112
Alienated space in Sinclair Ross’s As For Me and My House (1941) 113
Gendered re-visioning in Canadian modernism: Sheila Watson, Bertram Brooker and Elizabeth Smart 118
The polysemic word: from Smart to Klein’s Second Scroll (1951) 123
Conclusion 124

6 Feminist literatures: new poetics of identities and sexualities from
the 1960s to the twenty-first century 125
Overview 125
Gender and creativity in early feminist prose fiction 125
Margaret Laurence: decolonization and writing in Africa 129
Margaret Laurence’s Manawaka Cycle (1964 to 1974) 130
A change of scenery/Dépaysement: the nomadic fiction of Gabrielle Roy 132
Alice Munro’s visionary short stories 134
“Scandalous bodies”: gender recoding and auto/biographies from Aritha Van Herk to Kerri Sakamoto 136
Japanese Canadian internment and historical silences in Joy Nozomi Kogawa’s Obasan (1981) 137
Postmodern auto/biography in the work of Carol Shields 138
A “politics of location” in Daphne Marlatt and Dionne Brand 139
Psychogeography in Canadian Asian writing 141
Feminist poetry: an alternative space of writing (or, being Other) 142
Theorizing feminist collaborative and communal writing in the 1980s and 1990s 143
Embodying theory from postmodernism to postcolonialism: feminist conceptions of translation, textuality and corporeality 145
Recoding the symbolic mother: Nicole Brossard’s These Our Mothers (1977) and Picture Theory (1982) 148
The feminist-deconstructive poetics of Lola Lemire Tostevin 149
“Between command and defiance”: mothers and daughters in the poetry of Di Brandt 150
Diasporic doubled consciousness: Dionne Brand’s postcolonial Canada 151
Performing gender/feminist theatrical subjectivities 152
Foundational feminist drama from the 1930s to the work of Gwen Pharis Ringwood 152
The 1970s and 1980s: new environments and dramatic re-telling of women’s stories 153
Carnival and the picaresque heroine in Antonine Maillet’s Sagouine (1971) 154
Sharon Pollock and Margaret Hollingsworth: alternative worlds 155
Psychodrama and “the violent woman” in feminist theatre in the 1980s and 1990s 156
Dramatic sites of desire: lesbian theatre in Canada 158
Conclusion 159

7 Contemporary indigenous literatures: Narratives of autonomy
and resistance 160
Overview 160
New venues, new voices: indigenous publishing in the 1960s 160
Anthologization: recollecting and innovating 162
Contemporary Aboriginal writing/performance in English 163
The hybrid drama of Tomson Highway 163
Aboriginal drama in the 1970s and 1980s 166
Collaborations: Maria Campbell and Linda Griffiths negotiate The Book of Jessica: A Theatrical Transformation (1989) 166
The residential schools explored through theatre: Oskinoko Larry Loyie, Vera Manuel and Joseph A. Dandurand 167
Monique Mojica’s Princess Pocahontas and the Blue Spots (1991) 168
The satirical humour of Drew Haydon Taylor and Daniel David Moses 168
Interrogating colonial history and its societal impact: the rise of the Aboriginal novel 170
Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water (1993) 170
Aboriginal fiction surveyed: the 1980s and 1990s 171
Intertextuality and the native gothic in Eden Robinson’s Traplines (1996) and Monkey Beach (2000) 171
Power relations in Eden Robinson’s Blood Sports (2006) 173
Globalized Aboriginal literature 174
“Words are memory”: contemporary Aboriginal poetry – new beginnings 174
Aesthetic/poetic growth in the 1990s and twenty-first century 177
Conclusion 179

8 Canadian postmodernism: Genre trouble and new media in
contemporary Canadian writing 180
Overview 180
Beginnings, or, deconstructive voices: Margaret Atwood 181
The historiographical metafiction of George Bowering 183
Metafictional parodies in the writing of Leonard Cohen and Robert Kroetsch 185
The postmodern “freak shows” of Susan Swan and Jack Hodgins 188
“The politics of settlement”: giving voice to community in the postmodern fiction of Rudy Wiebe 190
Genre trouble and new media technologies: Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient (1992) 191
Tele-vision: Catherine Bush’s Minus Time (1993) 193
Hyperreal Canada and digital domains: postmodern journeys Into fear and the virtual worlds of William Gibson 195
Mediatized /Postmodernism performance 198
Conclusion 199

9 Concluding with the postcolonial imagination: Diversity,
difference and ethnicity 201
Overview 201
The postcolonial paradigm: contested understandings and alternative models 201
Theorizing “Trans.Can.Lit” 203
Re-conceiving the Canadian canon – postcolonial possibilities and allegorical resistances 205
Reconceiving the canon through African Canadian perspectives 207

Conclusion 210

Glossary of terms 211
Guide to further reading 217
Works cited 226
Index 239