The Canadian Postmodern:
A Study of Contemporary English-Canadian Fiction

What is the “Canadian postmodern”? Nigel Scott’s cover photograph offers a place to start: this is self-consciously art (note the unevenly hung backdrop) and it is obviously parodic, exploiting but also carefully undermining several recognizable traditions of the representation of women (passive woman on pedestal; pin-up bathing beauty; Rolls Royce figure) in order to show how art constructs rather than reflects ‘reality’. In the postmodern novel, we find the same self-reflexivity, the same parody, but always combined with an awareness of the particularities of the place and time in which the work is both written and read. The move from modernism to postmodernism came with the paradoxical use of that art-as-art focus to engage directly with the social, the political, and the historical—to comment critically on the worlds of both art and experience.

The Canadian Postmodern examines the theory and practice of postmodernism as seen through both contemporary cultural theory and the writings of Audrey Thomas, Michael Ondaatje, Robert Kroetsch, Margaret Atwood, Timothy Findley, Jack Hodgins, Aritha Van Herk, Leonard Cohen, Susan Swan, Clark Blaise, George Bowering, and others.

Table of Contents

Preface

Chapter One:
Introduction

Chapter Two:
Caveat Lector: The Early Postmodernism of Leonard Cohen

Chapter Three:
The Postmodernism Scribe: The Dynamic Stasis of Contemporary Canadian Writing

Chapter Four:
Historiographic Metafiction

Chapter Five:
The Postmodern Challenge to Boundaries

Chapter Six:
‘Shape Shifters': Canadian Women Writers and the Tradition

Chapter Seven:
Process, Produce, and Politics: The Postmodernism of Margaret Atwood

Chapter Eight:
Seeing Double: Concluding with Kroetsch

Appendix:
The Novel (1972-1984) from The Literary History of Canada, Vol. 4.