| This thesis analyzes representative works of contemporary English-Canadian fiction that focus primarily on the experience, representation, and interpretation of history. My critical analysis of these works' narrative and thematic strategies reveals that they challenge traditional ways of thinking about history. Proposing that history is more than just a chronicle of the past, this fiction investigates and enacts a metacritical interrogation of 'the historical,' a fundamental mode of socio-political discourse that regulates memory and identity. By recognizing that representation itself determines how we transmit and interpret our past, these works both contest static presentations of history and explore more dynamic, alternative modes of historical representation, in essence, 'reconfiguring' history. They represent a departure from traditional historical fiction, comprising an exemplary category I label 'metahistorical fiction.'.;After a theoretical introduction, which places metahistorical fiction in the context of Canadian literary history, my close readings of representative texts begin with Leonard Cohen's subversion of traditional history in Beautiful Losers. Since this novel announces such a radical break with previous historical fiction, it remains a key critical and aesthetic reference point for Canadian literature. I then analyze Mavis Gallant's "German stories," which illustrate the effects of politically sanctioned versions of history on the post-Second World War era and posit a correlation between the way political institutions manipulate history and families distort memory. Timothy Findley's two overtly metahistorical novels, The Wars and Famous Last Words, focus on the essential need to 'pay attention' to the past and suggest that we cannot interpret history without judging it. I establish that, for Findley, historical adjudication relies on the modes through which we represent the past. I then examine two authors whose fiction 'trans-scribes' generic boundaries--Robert Kroetsch and Michael Ondaatje. I demonstrate that The Collected Works of Billy the Kid and The Studhorse Man challenge the traditional boundaries separating both history, legend, and myth and poetry, fiction, and biography. I conclude by indicating how In the Skin of a Lion presents dynamic possibilities for the representation of history in fiction. |
