National Plots: Historical Fiction and Changing Ideas of Canada

By Wilfrid Laurier University Press

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier University Press
• Release date: Oct 4, 2010
• ISBN: 9781554582099

Book preview

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.

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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

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

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Cover design by David Drummond. Text design by Daiva Villa, Chris Rowat Design.

© 2010 Wilfrid Laurier University Press

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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.

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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: Aimée 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-Domínguez

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 Lukács 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, Lukács 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). Lukács 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 Gaspé (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 Napoléon Bourassa’s Jacques et Marie: Souvenirs d’un peuple dispersé (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 fiction have traditionally been informed by international models. While these models may include literary ones, such as the nineteenth-century historical novelist Sir Walter Scott, they also include theoretical ones. Stacey draws particular attention to Lukács, the theorist of historical causality, whose definition of the historical novel is ultimately inappropriate to Canada—a country chronically unable to achieve a unified national culture. Stacey’s observation provides a useful starting point from which to offer a brief overview of pertinent critical assessments of Canadian historical fiction. From the nineteenth century to the post-centenary period, many of these assessments bear witness to literary scholars’ sympathy toward historical novelists. The latter faced noticeable difficulties in attempting to contain Canada’s complicated past within tidy subplots of intercultural courtship and rapprochement which had been de rigueur since the publication of Scott’s Waverley (1814). At the same time, these assessments bear witness to another set of challenges, namely those faced by the commentators themselves for whom a tradition of historical fiction-writing was nearly impossible to define without recognizable literary masterpieces. In an early, though still important, study of nineteenth-century French-Canadian historical fiction, David M. Hayne contrasts Scott’s achievements with those of Canadian novelists in order to complain that the latter found it impossible to be loyal to plot and history at the same time (1945, 160). Hayne’s contemporary Edward McCourt also evokes the model of Scott—the writer who did more than any professional historian to make mankind advance towards a true conception of history ([1946] 1981, 171)—to lament the fact that English-Canadian novels combine historical accuracy with elements of melodrama so farfetched they move in dimensions since explored only by Walt Disney and Superman ([1946] 1981, 166). During the post-centenary period, Lukács replaced Scott as the predominant model against which the historical novel was evaluated. Nevertheless, Lukács’s influential examination of the genre failed to provide literary critics with the criteria needed to appreciate Canadian novelists’ sense of history (Sorfleet 1973, 132).² George Woodcock’s famous observation that the historical novelist is in any case a rather rare Canadian species (1979, 141) may be out of date to the extent that Canada does not lack for historical novelists today. Nevertheless, it remains relevant as a reminder of the challenges that have faced not only historical novelists but also literary critics of the genre. It also serves to remind readers of the extent to which the content and tone of literary criticism on historical fiction has changed since the advent of post-structuralism and, in particular, since the publication of Linda Hutcheon’s influential studies of the genre.

The current wave of criticism on Canadian historical fiction began over two decades ago with the publication of Hutcheon’s Canadian Historiographic Metafiction (1984–85), which links changes to the narrative forms of reflexive historical novels to larger changes in Canadians’ historical self-understanding. In this essay, Hutcheon famously places recent metafictions by Rudy Wiebe (1973), Timothy Findley ([1977] 1996), and George Bowering ([1980] 1994), among many others published in the 1970s and the early 1980s, in opposition to conventional realist novels, based on their different ways of handling the mimetic connection between art and life: In recent metafictions, Hutcheon argues, this connection "no longer operates entirely at the level of product alone, that is, at the level of the representation of a seemingly unmediated world, but instead functions on the level of process too" (1984–85, 228; original italics). Hutcheon supports her argument by appealing to recent theoretical developments in structuralism and post-structuralism by Tzvetan Todorov (1978) and Roland Barthes (1982), whose examinations of reading practices and the production of meaning through processes of énonciation and discours, respectively,³ enable her to define the features of her corpus by the ways in which novels expose the productive, collaborative relationship between writers and readers who together make historiographical revision meaningful. Since the publication of Canadian historiographic metafiction, then, the historical novel has become a touchstone for literary critics seeking to understand how Canadian literature encourages readers to reconsider traditional historical processes, national narratives, and communal priorities.

In the handful of years that followed the publication of Hutcheon’s article, several studies took up the challenge of revaluing the historical novel’s place in literary history in light of changing literary theories and novelists’ revisionary responses to Canada’s past. In Sounding the Iceberg (1986), for example, Dennis Duffy connects revivals in the historical novel’s popularity to key periods of nationalist resurgence in English Canada and Quebec from the nineteenth century to the latter decades of the twentieth. In Narrative Development in the Canadian Historical Novel, Ronald Hatch demonstrates the extent to which changing conceptions of culture and changing romantic and realist modes of fiction converge to reflect Canadians developing … sense of history over time (1986, 92). In Canadian Historical Fiction, Leslie Monkman offers a deeply contextual reading of the difficulties that Canadian novelists have faced, from the nineteenth century to the latter decades of the twentieth, in their attempts to construct authoritative versions of [Canada’s] past (1987, 639). And in The Canadian Postmodern (Hutcheon 1988b), which contains a version of Canadian Historiographic Metafiction in its well-known fourth chapter, Hutcheon builds on her earlier research and complements the work she presents in A Poetics of Postmodernism (1988c) by investigating the formal, thematic, and ideological implications of postmodern fiction’s intense auto-referentiality compounded, however paradoxically, by readers’ desire for didacticism.

It is noteworthy that this body of criticism, taken together, reasserts the reader’s importance within the field of novel studies. For, in this respect, it establishes fundamental links between Canadian literary critics and contemporary narratologists, philosophers, and historians who exerted a mutual influence on one another throughout the 1980s and the 1990s in their examinations of the intersections between historical writing and individual and communal self-understanding. That importance had recently come into evidence in such landmark publications in the discipline of history as Hayden White’s Metahistory, which underscores significant connections between novelists and historians based on their shared reliance on ‘emplotting’ strategies of exclusion, emphasis, and subordination as a means of structuring and organizing their historical narratives (1973, 7). White’s fusion of history with narratology and literary criticism gave rise to a number of related studies that approach history proper as a textual, imaginative, or narrative construct.⁴ These include an important set of essays by Louis O. Mink, which examine modes of comprehension and forms of cognition in history and fiction. Perhaps most pertinent to the writing and reading of historical fiction are Mink’s own answers to questions he poses about why the convergence of history with fiction is important from readers’ perspectives: first, that it is [in] history and fiction [where] we learn how to tell and to understand complex stories, and how it is that stories answer questions (1987a, 60); and second, that narrative form is rivaled only by theory and by metaphor as an instrument for making the flux of experience comprehensible (1987b, 185). Adding to Mink’s discussion of the role that readers play in making historiography meaningful, the historian Linda Orr insists on the cognitive effects of readers’ affective responses to history: to miss the emotional intensity of the historical operation, she insists, is to miss a major part of its meaning (1995, 90). The roots of historians’ attitudes toward affect, and the role it plays in making historical writing meaningful, may go at least as far back as the publication of Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley novels in the early nineteenth century.⁵ Their phenomenal success prompted contemporary historians to debate the extent to which historical fiction represented a complement to history proper, or even a superior mode of historical writing.⁶ But it was not until the mid- to late twentieth century that a considerable body of writing in historiography had, as Mark Phillips observes, become inspired by the unfamiliar methods of literary criticism (2000, ix).

In the decades following the publication of Hutcheon’s essay on historiographic metafiction, several studies have reconsidered the terms with which critics have accounted for the historical novel’s contribution to literary history. These have included Martin Kuester’s Framing Truths: Parodic Structures in Contemporary English-Canadian Historical Novels (1992), Manina Jones’s That Art of Difference: Documentary-Collage and English-Canadian Writing (1993b), the essays collected in Bernd Engler’s and Kurt Müller’s Historiographic Metafiction in Modern American and Canadian Literature (1994), Marie Vautier’s New World Myth: Postmodernism and Postcolonialism in Canadian Fiction (1998), Wyile’s Speculative Fictions: Contemporary Canadian Novelists and the Writing of History (2002) and Speaking in the Past Tense: Canadian Novelists on Writing Historical Fiction (2007c), Marc Colavincenzo’s Trading Magic for Fact, Fact for Magic: Myth and Mythologizing in Postmodern Canadian Historical Fiction (2003), as well as special issues of Studies in Canadian Literature (Past Matters 2002) and Canadian Literature (Archives and History 2003). These studies and others have contributed significant insight into historical fiction’s varying formal and ideological connections with literary postmodernism, post-colonial theory, and changing ideas of Canada. They represent important recent antecedents to the work that is presented in this collection. This is especially the case when one takes into account their mutual focus on a feature of Canadian historical fiction that Engler and Müller have described as its double-sidedness—that is, its simultaneously [de]constructive and re-constructive qualit[ies] (1994, 11–12). In Framing Truths, for example, Kuester explores the extent to which Canadian historical novels at once legitimize and subvert that which [they] parody (1992, 4). In New World Myth, Vautier examines the double and seemingly contradictory motivation of metafictions from Canada and Quebec, which self-consciously challenge, at the same time as they rework, traditional conceptualizations of myth (1998, xi). In Speculative Fictions, in turn, Wyile explores the extent to which historical metafictions variously challenge and uphold the national allegory. In her chapter in this volume, Cynthia Sugars sustains a similar focus on the apparently deconstructive and reconstructive qualities of Canadian historical novels when she argues that Aimée Laberge’s Where the River Narrows (2003) [represents] a return to national history packaged in the guise of an interrogation of that history. Paul Chafe, in turn, examines the failure of protagonists in Wayne Johnston’s The Colony of Unrequited Dreams (1998) and Michael Crummey’s River Thieves (2001) to correct a perceived loss of nationhood incurred with Newfoundland’s entry into Canadian Confederation in 1949. The protagonists’ inability to counter the devastating effects of Newfoundland’s entry into Confederation, however, ends up imbuing the nation with a priority that haunts the narrative margins of both novels. Taken together, many of the chapters gathered here bear witness to scholars’ sustained interest in exploring the ways in which history, fiction, and revision work at cross-purposes to one another in recent historical novels.

Over the last two-and-a-half decades, the most influential vocabularies for rethinking the historical novel’s aesthetic features and social role have been provided by literary postmodernism and post-colonial theory. From Hutcheon’s examination of Canadians’ post-colonial … need to reclaim the past (1984–85, 236) to Wyile’s investigation of postcolonial, revisionist accounts of Canadian history and historiography in recent historical novels (2002, xii), post-structuralist conceptions of language, subjectivity, and narrative, as well as post-colonial reconfigurations of the aesthetic, political, and cultural legacy of Canada’s past, have represented shared preoccupations of historical novelists and literary critics. At the same time, the last two decades have witnessed noticeable changes in the themes and forms of Canadian historical novels and, as a result, of the vocabulary that literary critics have used to discuss them. In the context of the chapters presented in this volume, the most influential expression of these changes arguably occurs in Speculative Fictions, where Wyile (2002) observes that the themes and forms of recent novels by Guy Vanderhaeghe, Jane Urquhart, Johnston, and many others work within and against one another in their efforts to expand the accepted parameters of that which is considered to count as Canadian history. Citing Fredric Jameson, who associates postmodernism with a kind of dehistoricized transformation of the past (Wyile 2002, 254; Jameson 1991, 81), Wyile argues that historical fiction published since 1985 is relatively uninterested in such achieving such dehistoricizing effects. This is so, he observes, because recent fiction seems less radical and more ambivalent in its challenging of the underpinnings of empiricist historiography and [of] the form of the traditional historical novel (Wyile 2002, xii) than fiction published in the 1970s and the first half of the 1980s. Wyile attributes such an increasing ideological and formal conservatism to a double-bind that contemporary writers face: desiring to negotiate, on the one hand, a more postcolonial presentation of Canadian history, yet yielding to the demands of a literary marketplace that exerts on them strong pressures to render history in a commodified and dehistoricized form (2002, xii). In focusing on Canadian historical novels’ double-sidedness—that is, their skepticism toward historical master narratives and simultaneous reluctance to dispose entirely of communally informed historical consciousness—Wyile identifies an important shift over the last forty years in novelists’ treatment, not only of history, but also of fiction and the role the latter plays in giving readers the textual cues with which they imbue the past with layers of meaning. A number of contributors to National Plots either implicitly or explicitly respond to the dynamic that Wyile describes. They do so by questioning, in Duffy’s terms, history’s role in the construction of fiction. In his examination of Alice Munro’s Meneseteung (1988), for example, Tracy Ware quotes Magdalene Redekop in order to ask how writers like Munro ‘affirm the lives of [our] predecessors’ when the only means to do so ‘returns us to the fact of artifice.’ Questioning the notion that the postmodern historical novel is any more democratic than its classic predecessor, Albert Braz asks how exactly it is that fiction, especially postmodern fiction, works to challenge the nation’s ‘official’ history. As Venema argues in her examination of Fred Stenson’s The Trade (2000), although Stenson aims to revise traditional master narratives, his novel ultimately uncovers the better truths of fiction in ways that are neither historiographically nor ethically neutral.

If, as Rigney has argued in the context of European historical novels, innovations to existing literary forms signal the emergence of new topics of inquiry (2001, 9), then it is not surprising that any apparent changes to novelists’ approaches to fiction in historical writing should elicit critical responses to them. In literary critic Ina Ferris’s terms, however, any debate about the slippery status of historical fiction should prompt critics to ask larger questions about the social implications of fictional genres (1991, 143). The questions that contributors to National Plots pose reveal their shared approach to historical fiction as a genre whose particularly fraught formal and epistemological status has had a marked impact on critical assessments of its social role. Taken together, many of the chapters gathered here address the social role of historical fiction through a shared vocabulary of responsibility—to the past, to readers in the present, and to the form of historical fiction itself: What responsibilities, to the past and to the future, do writers take on when they reframe history? (Venema). What are the historiographical and ethical implications of narrative revision? (Ware). Can we assume that questioning historicity inevitably leads to a superior mode of understanding? (Duffy). In contrast to Hutcheon’s observation that historiographic metafiction offers, by definition, only questions, never final answers (1988b, 42), Ware emphasizes the fact that, for readers as well as for writers, the ‘hope of … making a connection’ with the past persists.

Although White posits significant links between novelists and historians in Metahistory, he also concludes that historians are burdened with a uniquely challenging task: that of confronting "a veritable chaos of events already constituted (1973, 6). Hutcheon corrects White by arguing that writers of historical fiction, too, deal with events already constituted. At the same time, she adds, writers of historiographic metafiction are charged with an additional task—that of deal[ing] with literature’s intertexts as well as history’s documents (Hutcheon 1984–85, 232). Recalling Hutcheon’s argument, Aritha van Herk observes in her chapter in this volume that historical novelists struggle to depict events already consumed and delineated." While many contributors to National Plots intervene in debates about the nature of historical writing, these debates take a particular shape in chapters gathered in Part Two, which explicitly respond to matters concerning the quality and availability of the historical record. In both Speculative Fictions and his introduction to the collection of interviews, Speaking in the Past Tense, Wyile makes two observations that are relevant in this context: first, that the very exclusiveness of the historical record, which tends to be preoccupied with the activities of white, upper-class English males (2007b, 4) has had a material impact on Canadian historical fiction, which remains the preserve of writers of European heritage; and second, that the extent of this impact should raise serious questions about issues of cultural politics and appropriation (2002, 37). Recent novels by Joseph Boyden (2005), George Elliott Clarke (2005b), and Lawrence Hill (2007b) thus represent landmark publications, not only because their authors are members of cultural minorities, but also for the ways in which they add new voices to a body of revisionary historiography begun three decades ago by Joy Kogawa (1981) and SKY Lee (1990), among others.

Chapters gathered in Part Two of National Plots explicitly respond to the notion that a pervasive Eurocentrism has shaped the writing and reception of Canadian historical fiction, beginning with Wyile’s own chapter on Boyden’s bestseller Three Day Road (2005). Wyile focuses on the ways in which Three Day Road introduces Aboriginal motifs into historical fiction on the world wars, thereby expanding the formal and thematic boundaries of the Canadian historical novel in unprecedented ways. Shelley Hulan, in turn, implicitly builds on Wyile’s argument by focusing on Aboriginal authorship in Canadian historical fiction. At the same time, Hulan challenges traditional definitions of the genre by examining Native-authored non-fiction as a form of historical fiction. Paying particular attention to the Traditional History and Characteristic Sketches of the Ojibway Nation ([1850] 1972) by the Ojibway leader George Copway, or Wau-boo-jeeg (c. 1747–93), Hulan examines the ways in which Copway deploys fictional techniques in order to challenge Eurocentric representations of First Nations as members of a vanishing race. Like Wyile, Pilar Cuder-Domínguez notes the relative absence of historical novelists who are members of cultural minorities. Arguing that the intersection between fiction and history in the writing of African-Canadian authors has been neglected, Cuder-Domínguez corrects this gap by exploring novelistic representations of the post-abolition period by Mairuth Sarsfield (1997), Hill (1992), and Clarke (2005b). Focusing on gender rather than on culture, van Herk emphasizes the continuing, subversive roles that female characters play in such novels as Thomas Wharton’s Icefields (1995) and Robert Kroetsch’s The Man from the Creeks (1998). Here, van Herk argues, female characters subvert not only historical master narratives, but also the traditional boundaries of historical fiction. Taken together, the chapters in this section intervene in debates about the quality and availability of the historical record by arguing for an expansion of the boundaries of historical fiction’s traditional features, as well as of its traditional corpus of authors.

Over two decades following the publication of Hutcheon’s Canadian Historiographic Metafiction, the historical novel’s changing forms and themes continue to elicit new questions about the genre’s social role and place in literary history. The questions pursued by contributors to this volume include, but are not limited to, the following: What kinds of historical, cultural, or national narratives do Canadian historical novels aim to displace, revise, reinscribe, or replace? What social roles do historical fiction’s component parts—history and fiction—perform in a given text? What are the advantages and disadvantages of using the nation as a heuristic device for reading historical fiction? What are historical fiction’s promises and limitations when it is understood as a vehicle for conveying new narratives or new kinds of knowledge? National Plots is occasioned by these sorts of questions as they surround the increasing popularity of historical fiction and its ongoing importance in literary criticism. The chapters gathered here variously question, challenge, or uphold the value of historical fiction as an aesthetic vehicle for negotiating changing ideas of Canada. They approach novelistic representations of Canada from ex-centric perspectives—Aboriginal, Métis, African-Canadian, feminist, and regional. The chapters collected here engage in debates over the success or failure of revisionary historiography to challenge the status quo. In some cases, they propose formal, thematic, or epistemological alternatives to the versions of history, character, and society that individual works of fiction present to readers. They share in common their concern to pry apart the form’s composite terms—history and fiction—in order to investigate the cultural, social, or ideological uses to which each have been put in particular instances. Because of the broad scope of these concerns, the editors of National Plots have not imposed conformity. Instead, the chapters contain a range of critical perspectives, argumentative styles, and points of entry into salient debates about historiography, post-colonialism, and literary nationalism with particular reference to the writing and reading of Canadian historical fiction. It should be noted that both the first and the last parts of National Plots close with chapters on Meneseteung by Ware and Duffy, respectively. The inclusion of Munro’s short fiction in a volume whose contributors focus largely on novelistic production complements the project that Hulan’s chapter consciously undertakes—that is, to encourage the examination of other forms of writing within a critical discourse that has given priority to the novel. Nevertheless, more work needs to be done in order to broaden the scope of scholarship on reflexive historiography to include comparative, cross-generic examinations of fiction in relation to other forms, such as historical drama and long poems, among others.

Since its appearance in the early nineteenth century, the Canadian historical novel has generated vibrant, sometimes heated, debate about the capacity of history and fiction to convey self-knowledge. The chapters here read individual works of fiction in light of the complex network of formal or narrative cues they contain. In doing so, they sustain a focus on matters of literary form articulated by Hutcheon and her contemporaries. At the same time, they display a renewed critical interest in what Marjorie Levinson, in her article New Formalism, has described as the formal sensitivity to literature (2007, 568). To read historical fiction with formal sensitivity involves reading The Trade, not through the lens of literary realism but rather through the lens of its peculiarly Gothic forms, as Venema does here. To read with formal sensitivity also involves understanding the discursive relationship between the main and frame narratives in Where the River Narrows as Sugars does, for the ways in which they produce a narratologically uneven work of fiction whose feminist, revisionary aims clash with its larger narrative desire to revive an outdated cultural nationalism in its treatment of Quebec history. To read with formal sensitivity also involves reading Three Day Road as Wyile does, for the ways that its various narrative layers revitalize the themes and conventions of [historical fiction] about the Great War by framing them through particular Aboriginal cultural motifs. As van Herk observes, if [a] novel is to be successful, the way that the story unfolds—as opposed to what happens—becomes the very essence of the text. The chapters in National Plots approach individual works of historical fiction with a shared awareness of the different—sometimes competing—socio-historical and discursive contexts in which they have been produced. In his chapter that closes this volume, Duffy remarks on the limitations of reading Alice Munro’s Meneseteung scientifically, with an antiquarian’s appetite for footnotes and an antiquarian’s desire to uncover the facts upon which the story is based. Whether authored by Stenson, Laberge, Boyden, Munro, or any other writer addressed here, historical fiction remains a uniquely composite, hence ever-changing, form. As the contributors to National Plots remind us, literary critics must adapt their reading skills to suit each work of historical fiction with its distinctive combination of formal, thematic, and discursive features.

Kathleen Venema’s chapter opens Part One of National Plots. In "‘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 archives," Venema explores the ethical and allegorical implications of the convergence of history and the Gothic in The Trade’s representations of Aboriginal and mixed-blood characters. Although Stenson’s novel is typically postmodern in its skeptical treatment of the notion of transparent historical knowledge it also, Venema argues, forecloses on such skepticism by proposing that an alternate version of a knowable past exists. This alternate version is inextricably linked, she observes, to the Gothic conventions with which it is shaped. Venema quotes David Punter, who notes that the Gothic is characterized by a wholesale concern with the nature of taboo—with that which offends, which is suppressed, and which is generally swept under the carpet in the interests of social and psychological equilibrium (Punter 1996, 183–84). If Punter is correct, Venema maintains, then Stenson’s choice to place mixed-blood characters at the crux of his Gothic revision of the nineteenth-century fur trade world is neither ethically nor historically neutral.

In her Reading Group Guide to Where the River Narrows, the novelist Aimée Laberge reveals that she shares her protagonist’s concerns with reconcil[ing] her family history with the history of Québec itself (Laberge, n.p.). In "Past Lives: Aimée Laberge’s Where the River Narrows and the Transgenerational Gene Pool, Cynthia Sugars responds to Laberge’s conflation of individual with national histories in order to ask what is it, precisely, that history