Canadian short fiction: A comparative study

Despite its important place in Canadian literature, short fiction receives little attention from Canadian literary critics. This thesis proposes to fill this gap by focusing on Canadian short fiction as a distinct genre, with its own tradition--or rather, two traditions. The emphasis of this study is on two "non-thematic" aspects which distinguish English-Canadian from Quebec short fiction: first, the way in which the real, extratextual world is re-presented in the fictional world, and second, the kind of authority claimed by the narrators to tell their stories.; As explained in the chapter which sets out the theoretical framework underlying this study, literature is not an autonomous entity. It is a means of communication between a real author and real readers, and as such it is subject to extratextually available conventions. As this suggests, a "literary" tradition consists of more than a closed world of purely literary or even ideological influences; it resides to a large extent in the referential and communicative conventions governing the culture in which the literary texts are produced and received.; The objectives of this thesis, then, are to show that English-Canadian and Quebec short fiction possess such "literary" traditions, and that these manifest themselves in the specific referential and communicative relationships established (and the conventions used) in the texts. Differences between English-Canadian and Quebec short fiction in terms of these two relationships can be traced back to the nineteenth-century origins of Canadian literature, and continue to inform contemporary Canadian short fiction.; To show this, two chapters on the Canadian short fiction traditions will outline how different ways of dealing with the extratextual world and with the reader have consistently characterized English-Canadian and Quebec short fiction. They will be followed by a more detailed exploration of the impact and use of these relationships in the short fiction of two individual authors (Alice Munro and Jacques Ferron) whose work can, in this respect, be considered emblematic of the English-Canadian and Quebec short fiction tradition.