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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 vii viii I N T R O D U C T I O N 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 Napol...

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