Mapping and Historiography in Contemporary Canadian Literature in English

This study focuses on the way in which Canadian novels of the 1980s and 1990s use mapping and historiography as themes, metaphors and narrative models. While John Steffler's The Afterlife of George Cartwright reveals the past influence of colonial ideology on mapping and historiography and its lasting effects, Daphne Marlatt's Ana Historic challenges patriarchal mappings and historiographies. In In the Skin of a Lion Michael Ondaatje portrays Canada in the early twentieth century as a capitalist society determined by colonial attitudes. Ondaatje's The English Patient illustrates the difficulty of defining an individual or communal identity in the postcolonial age of globalisation. The analysis of these representative novels is complemented by references to further Canadian works which reveal that Canadian literature mirrors and promotes current debates on the construction of reality and on multicultural and global identities.

The Author: Nicola Renger was born in Bad Driburg in 1969. Having visited the LaGrange College in Georgia, USA, and the University of Leeds, Great Britain, she finished her First State Exam for Teaching at the University of Braunschweig and started work on her Ph.D.-thesis in 1997. In the following year she held seminars on Canadian literature in the English Department in Braunschweig. In 1999 she received a one-year-research scholarship for the University of Toronto in Canada and completed her Ph.D. in 2003. After finishing her Second State Exam in 2005, she began working as a teacher in a Gymnasium in Hamburg.

Contents: Contemporary Canadian literature - Postcolonial/feminist/communal mapping and historiography - Alternative mappings and historiographies - Document - Polyphony - Body - Immigration and migration - Internationalisation and globalisation - Hybrid identity.