National Plots

Description

Fiction that reconsiders, challenges, reshapes, and/or upholds national narratives of history has long been an integral aspect of Canadian literature. Works by writers of historical fiction (from early practitioners such as John Richardson to contemporary figures such as Alice Munro and George Elliott Clarke) propose new views and understandings of Canadian history and individual relationships to it. Critical evaluation of these works sheds light on the complexity of these depictions.

The contributors in National Plots: Historical Fiction and Changing Ideas of Canada critically examine texts with subject matter ranging from George Vancouver’s west coast explorations to the eradication of the Beothuk in Newfoundland. Reflecting diverse methodologies and theoretical approaches, the essays seek to explicate depictions of “the historical” in individual texts and to explore larger questions relating to historical fiction as a genre with complex and divergent political motivations and goals. Although the topics of the essays vary widely, as a whole the collection raises (and answers) questions about the significance of the roles historical fiction has played within Canadian culture for nearly two centuries.

Sujets

• Literary criticism

Informations

• Publié par: Wilfrid Laurier University Press
• Date de parution: 04 octobre 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781554582099
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

NATIONAL PLOTS
NATIONAL PLOTS
HISTORICAL FICTION AND CHANGING IDEAS OF CANADA
EDITED BY ANDREA CABAJSKY AND BRETT JOSEF GRUBISIC
This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Aid to Scholarly Publications Programme, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
National plots : historical fiction and changing ideas of Canada / Andrea Cabajsky and Brett Josef Grubisic, editors.
Includes bibliographical references and index. Issued also in electronic format. ISBN 978-1-55458-061-3
1. Historical fiction, Canadian (English)-History and criticism. 2. National characteristics, Canadian, in literature. I. Cabajsky, Andrea, [date] II. Grubisic, Brett Josef
PS8191.H5N37 2010
C813 .081
C2010-900653-4
ISBN 978-1-55458-161-0 Electronic format.
1. Historical fiction, Canadian (English)-History and criticism. 2. National characteristics, Canadian, in literature. I. Cabajsky, Andrea, [date] II. Grubisic, Brett Josef
PS8191.H5N37 2010a
C813 .081
C2010-900654-2
Cover design by David Drummond. Text design by Daiva Villa, Chris Rowat Design.
2010 Wilfrid Laurier University Press Waterloo, Ontario, Canada www.wlupress.wlu.ca
This book is printed on FSC recycled paper and is certified Ecologo. It is made from 100% post-consumer fibre, processed chlorine free, and manufactured using biogas energy.
Printed in Canada
Every reasonable effort has been made to acquire permission for copyright material used in this text, and to acknowledge all such indebtedness accurately. Any errors and omissions called to the publisher s attention will be corrected in future printings.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.
CONTENTS
Historical Fiction and Changing Ideas of Canada
Andrea Cabajsky and Brett Josef Grubisic
PART ONE A USABLE PAST? NEW QUESTIONS, NEW DIRECTIONS
A Trading Shop So Crooked a Man Could Jump through the Cracks : Counting the Cost of Fred Stenson s Trade in the Hudson s Bay Company Archive
Kathleen Venema
Past Lives: Aim e Laberge s Where the River Narrows and the Transgenerational Gene Pool
Cynthia Sugars
The Orange Devil: Thomas Scott and the Canadian Historical Novel
Albert Braz
State of Shock: History and Crisis in Hugh MacLennan s Barometer Rising
Robert David Stacey
And They May Get It Wrong, After All : Reading Alice Munro s Meneseteung
Tracy Ware
PART TWO UNCONVENTIONAL VOICES: FICTION VERSUS RECORDED HISTORY
Windigo Killing: Joseph Boyden s Three Day Road
Herb Wyile
Telling a Better Story: History, Fiction, and Rhetoric in George Copway s Traditional History and Characteristic Sketches of the Ojibway Nation
Shelley Hulan
The Racialization of Canadian History: African-Canadian Fiction, 1990-2005
Pilar Cuder-Dom nguez
Turning the Tables
Aritha van Herk
PART THREE LITERARY HISTORIES, REGIONAL CONTEXTS
To Free Itself, and Find Itself : Writing a History for the Prairie West
Claire Campbell
Old Lost Land : Loss in Newfoundland Historical Fiction
Paul Chafe
Imagining Vancouvers: Burning Water, Ana Historic , and the Literary (Un)Settling of the Pacific Coast
Owen Percy
Too Little Geography; Too Much History: Writing the Balance in Meneseteung
Dennis Duffy
References
Contributors
Index
INTRODUCTION HISTORICAL FICTION AND CHANGING IDEAS OF CANADA
ANDREA CABAJSKY AND BRETT JOSEF GRUBISIC
National Plots is organized around the following question: What happens to the Canadian when it intersects with the historical in fictional writing? From its roots in the early nineteenth century to the present, the Canadian historical novel has been the subject of sustained debate about the role that history and fiction have played in the formation of national identity. A set of long-standing concerns has motivated these debates: concerns about the representation of cultural constituents in history; about the historical novel s capacity to encourage new or different vocabularies for writing about historical change; and about how and why the historical novel establishes links between social processes and larger communal development. In addition to taking into account landmark works and authors, the chapters collected here address historical fiction s changing themes, forms, and narrative structures that render legible past figures, events, and values from the purview of the present. This volume approaches the historical novel as a genre that represents, in Richard Maxwell s apt terms, as much a way of reading and a set of expectations as a memorable collection of books (2009, 2). Considering the extent to which the historical and the fictional have been mutually implicated in the writing and reception of historical fiction, National Plots is as much concerned with investigating the genre s composite terms as it is with exploring the changing connections between them and the ideas of Canada to which they have been connected over time.
What matters in the historical novel, Georg Luk cs argues, is not the retelling of great historical events, but the poetic awakening of the people who figured in those events ([1937] 1983, 42). In The Historical Novel , Luk cs defines historical fiction in paradoxical terms: as a genre that encourages readers to recognize their quotidian reality as the fulfillment of foundational events, encounters, or moments in the past; and a genre that remains elusive, for it possesses no formal or thematic features to differentiate it from other kinds of novels ([1937] 1983, 242). Luk cs is not the first to have underscored the historical novel s ambiguity. The nineteenth-century Italian historical novelist Alessandro Manzoni, author of The Betrothed (2004; originally published as I promessi sposi in 1827) and the classic essay On the Historical Novel ([1850] 1984), believed that the genre was unviable. As the historian Ann Rigney reminds us: Manzoni denounced the historical novel as a misbegotten, self-contradictory genre that was doomed to die out. Underlying his criticism was his belief that one of the prerequisites for discursive success was unity, defined as coherence of purpose together with a correspondence between that purpose and the means chosen to achieve it (Rigney 2001, 16). Rigney s use of the term misbegotten, which the Oxford English Dictionary defines as illegitimate or spurious, is evocative in this context. For to be spurious denotes that an object in question lacks a genuine character or quality, even though it may, on the surface, appear to possess it. Such a paradox explains much of the complicated literary theory and criticism that has traditionally informed key studies of the historical novel, such as Harry E. Shaw s Forms of Historical Fiction , which defines the genre as a fundamental mode of knowledge (1983, 28) at the same time as it grapples with the longstanding problem of how to make sense of it (1983, 19). As Rigney admits, theoretically embarrassing it may be, but this misfit has refused to go away (2001, 20).
Now nearly two centuries old, the Canadian historical novel has also enjoyed the dubious distinction of being a problematic genre. As Carole Gerson has observed, from its earliest introduction to Canada by Julia Beckwith Hart (1824), John Richardson ([1832] 1991), and Philippe Aubert de Gasp (1863), the historical novel has popularized and mythologized Canada s neglected history (1989, 91). Novelists writing in both official languages have variously grappled with the psychological damage of Canada s fraught cultural inheritance. At the same time, they have worked to recover aspects of the nation s past that have sometimes been as little-known to Canadians as they have been to foreign readers. 1 The frequently uneven narratives of a range of nineteenth-century novels, from Wacousta and Les Anciens Canadiens to Douglas S. Huyghue s Argimou: A Legend of the Micmac (1847) and Napol on Bourassa s Jacques et Marie: Souvenirs d un peuple dispers (1865), among many others, suggest that early historical novels were often stretched to their capacity by writers who attempted to impose on them the unified and purposive structure. A century and a half later, the historical novel s status remains highly fraught, especially when its complicated aesthetic inheritance and epistemological status are taken into account. As a result, in a recent interview with Herb Wyile, the historical novelist Guy Vanderhaeghe urges readers not to lose sight of matters of literary form and genre: I think you have to be honest when you stick [a] label on [a] book, you know memoir, autobiography, novel[.] I think people would do well to look at a book and see what it claims to be (Wyile 2007c, 131). What does historical fiction claim to be? To what extent have writers and readers expectations of the genre changed, as historical fiction s themes and forms have themselves changed over time?
Robert David Stacey observes in his chapter in this volume that the terms which critics have used to define Canadian historical