This book sets out to answer the following question: What happens to the “Canadian” when it intersects with the “historical” in fictional writing? To answer this question, the authors in the various chapters examine the debate about the role that history and fiction have played in the formation of Canadian national identity. The book explores novels by prominent Canadian authors and addresses historical fiction’s changing themes, forms, and narrative structures.

The book is divided into three parts. The first part is entitled “A Useable Past? New Questions, New Directions,” which includes five chapters. In Chapter 1, Kathleen Venema analyzes Fred Stenson’s The Trade to argue that although Stenson aims to revise traditional narratives, his novel ultimately uncovers truths of fiction that are not as historiographically or ethically neutral. In Chapter 2, Cynthia Sugars discusses the individual within national histories in Aimée Laberge’s Where the River Narrows and concludes that Laberge’s novel belongs to a conservative category of postmodern fiction. In Chapter 3, Albert Braz examines the representations of Louis Riel’s adversary, Thomas Scott, in Canadian literature that share a tendency to vilify Scott, to render him a marginal figure, or to excise him from history altogether. Braz believes this raises serious questions about the purposed historical and cultural inclusiveness of postmodern historiography. Robert David Stacey searches for a theorist of history and of historical writing appropriate to the Canadian context in Chapter 4. In addition Stacey discusses Hugh MacLennan’s Barometer Rising, arguing that the novel should be seen as a local model for subsequent historical fiction. In Chapter 5, Tracy Ware explores the implications of the revised ending of Alice Munro’s Meneseteung.

The second part of the book is entitled “Unconventional Voices: Fiction Versus Recorded History” and begins with Chapter 6, Herb Wyile’s observations on how Joseph Boyden’s Three Day Road aims to expand the repertoire of formal features with which Canadian historical fiction writers have traditionally treated the Great War. More specifically, Boyden discusses how the novel revisits the familiar terrain of the Western front, but revitalizes the themes and conventions of literature about the Great War by framing them through particular Aboriginal cultural motifs. In Chapter 7, Shelley Hulan discusses recent definitions of historical fiction in order to argue that the ways in which George Copway deploys fictional elements in Traditional History and Characteristic Sketches of the Ojibway Nation warrants observation because the book sustains a definition of historiography as the product of “controversy” and “debate,” it enables today’s readers to better appreciate the interplay between “oral history” and rhetorical “strategy” that allows Copway to critique chronology, and it offers another way of approaching historiography in Canada as having existed in pre-1900 non-fiction writing. In Chapter 8, Pilar Cuder-Dominguez explains how the general interest in African-Canadian literature has increased. She examines Lawrence Hill’s Some Great Thing, Mairuth Sarsfield’s No Crystal Stair, and George Elliott Clarke’s George & Rue in the context of recent theories of memory to discuss how African-Canadian writing challenges the exclusion of those peoples without history so that they too become subjects for the recovery of cultural memory. Aritha van Herk begins Chapter 9 by noting how the historical novel continues to be primarily constructed by masculinist master narratives. She focuses on five female characters in The Trade, Peter Olivia’s Drowning in Darkness, Thomas Wharton’s Icefields, and Robert Kroetsch’s The Man from the Creeks to discern a pattern whereby female characters effectively “turn the tables” on historical narratives.

The third part of the book is entitled “Literary Histories, Regional Contexts,” and begins with Chapter 10 where historian Claire Campbell provides a contextual piece that explores the intersections between literature and history in the Prairie West. She examines the connections between historical fiction from the Prairie West and other forms of writing about the Prairies, including public-school history textbooks, government archives, and museum exhibits. In Chapter 11, Paul Chafe observes that a sense of political, historical, and cultural loss has shaped recent Newfoundland historical fiction that responds to the province’s entry into Canadian Confederation in 1949. Chafe suggests The Colony of Unrequited Dreams by Wayne Johnston and River Thieves by Michael Crummey are postmodern in their interactions with history due to their attempt to uninvent the collective identity. In Chapter 12, Owen Percy examines George Bowering’s Burning Water and Daphne Marlatt’s Ana Historic to illustrate that the novels remain two very significant contributions to Canadian historiographic metafiction. In the final chapter of the book, Dennis Duffy theorizes Alice Munro’s place in literary history. He traces recognizable characteristics of postmodern writing to their literary historical roots in nineteenth-century Canada and Britain.