| Historically, the long poems of Canadian literature in English have been primarily regarded as narrative poetry, poetry which, for the most part, is concerned with telling a tale. However, in 1969, in her landmark essay "The Documentary Poem: A Canadian Genre," Dorothy Livesay posited that many of these works are not necessarily story-telling narratives as such, but documentary long poems that are founded upon factual cultural details, embodying the poet's attempt to articulate a communal vision of the historical and/or contemporaneous events, ideas, and forces influencing the life and times of a particular community. Yet, in providing a working definition of these documentary long poems, Livesay did not go far enough to delineate their generic characteristics, what sets them apart from other long poem works, indeed, what sets them apart from all other literary genres. Thus, this dissertation takes Livesay's views of documentary long poems as a starting point, but revises those views in order to establish the generic parameters and attributes of such poetry. Moreover, in the process of doing so, and contrary to both the limitations of thematic criticism's search for the Canadian identity and ideological criticism's belief that Canadian literature has historically been dominated by imported rather than indigenous ideas and ideals, the dissertation maintains that documentary long poems in Canadian literature are as rich in local, national, and international cultural content as they are in their formal variability.;What the introductory chapter establishes is a substantial definition of the generic term documentary long poem. The resulting definition stresses that documentary long poems are didactic and propagandistic, based upon historical and/or contemporaneous facts, and the literary fusion of lyrical, narrative, dramatic and/or rhetoric elements. Furthermore, such poetry is revisionist, for the poet functions as an interpreter who reconstructs only a part of the relevant cultural record, and as well typologically subordinates individualistic characters to serve the communal ideas and ideals he or she believes dominate the life and times of a given community.;Thereafter, over the course of five chapters, covering the period 1789-1974, the dissertation presents analysis and explication of various forms of the documentary long poem, distinguishing such poems from other long poem works in Canadian literature. (Abstract shortened by UMI.). |
