Exploring the excerpts: Historical documents and narrating Canadian identity

This thesis examines a specific type of documentary literature, one that narrates the exploration period of Canadian history through excerpting and re-framing the journal entries of early explorers. Because these literary texts are concerned with English Canada's founding, they provide an important context for thinking about the ways that Canadian history is used to construct, deconstruct, and reconstruct national identity. By returning to this seminal historic moment and reconfiguring history through a narrative dialogue with its documents, these authors not only undertake to re-conceptualize national identity; they also engage in a dialogue about representation versus truth. The dissertation begins with an examination of several poems -- John Newlove's "The Pride" (1968) and "Samuel Hearne in Wintertime" (1968), Marion Smith's Koo-koo-sint (1976), Jon Whyte's Homage, Henry Kelsey (1981), and Lionel Kearns' Convergences (1984) -- and then moves on three works of fiction: George Bowering's Burning Water (1980), Rudy Wiebe's A Discovery of Strangers (1994) and John Sterner's The Afterlife of George Cartwright (1992). All these texts incorporate actual passages from original historical documents, the explorers' journals or narratives. The thesis charts the different ways these Canadian writers re-frame the detailed, often dispassionate accounts of explorers, considering how each re-framing deals with the struggle of representing history responsibly and how such a representation also enacts a particular type of national narrative