| dc.description.abstract | This thesis attempts to discover the links between concepts of
identity and origins, and Canadian women's writing.
The work of three English-speaking Canadian women writers,
Mavis Gallant, Margaret Atwood and Alice Munro, will be
examined in order to discover the ways in which their writings
problematize feminine subjecthood, and in doing so shed light on
a specifically Canadian 'discourse' of identity. I posit thereby, that
perceiving the absences and silences structuring their modes of
representation is a (symbolic) means of perceiving Canada as a
dualistic, fractured, and contradictory unity. This implies a
dialogue between text and context: a reading of one through the
other.
The three writers in question draw on diverse, and often
opposing, centres of cultural and personal consciousness. I shall
attempt to demonstrate however, that the problematical concept
of origins and its relation to location and to feminine self-hood
defines all three. To do so I have chosen those texts, whether
novel or short story, which to my mind best articulate the social,
cultural and symbolic discourses informing the definition
'English-speaking Canadian Women's writing'. Other works not
included would undoubtedly have proved of interest, but the
type of 'close reading' which such themes required entailed an
automatic limitation on the range of fiction under scrutiny | en_US |
