Abstract
In December 1998, the American Historical Review (AHR) featured Margaret Atwood’s “In Search of Alias Grace: On Writing Canadian His torical Fiction” as the centerpiece of a special forum on “Histories and Historical Fiction.” Following on the success of her novel based on the life of Grace Marks, the nineteenth-century Irish maidservant convicted of murder, the lecture was originally delivered at the University of Ottawa on November 18, 1996, as part of the Bronfman lectures, a series established to “feature personalities who have made significant contributions to the study of Canada.”1 Deftly weaving personal reflections into a historical narrative that identifies her experience with a generation of writers who matured along with the culture, Atwood provides a personal narrative history that anticipates the reconstruction of her writing life later delivered as the Empson lectures and published as Negotiating with the Dead (2002).2 Whereas the AHR forum made the Bronfman lecture the focal point of a discussion of the relationship of historiography and historical fiction in general, the lecture had unified the diverse themes and concerns of individual authors of historical fiction in a shared investigation of Canada’s past. In it, Atwood tells of growing up in a country that seemed to have neither history nor literature and ventures that writers are drawn to the past by “the lure of the unmentionable—the mysterious, the buried, the forgotten, the discarded, the taboo.”3
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Notes
Atwood, Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing (Cambridge University Press, 2002).
Atwood, Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature ( Toronto: Anansi, 1972 ), 18–19.
Foucault, “Nietzsche, Geneaology, History,” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984 ), 81.
Atwood, Days of the Rebels 1815–1840 ( Toronto: Natural Science of Canada, 1977 ), 7.
Rosemary Sullivan, The Red Shoes: Margaret Atwood Starting Out (Toronto: HarperCollins, 1998), 312. The television production was directed by George Jonas.
Atwood, “Author’s Afterword,” in Alias Grace (1996; repr. Toronto: McClelland-Bantam, 1997 ), 557.
Atwood, “In Search of Alias Grace: On Writing Canadian Historical Fiction,” American Historical Review 103, no. 5 (1998): 1513.
Elizabeth Jane Errington, Wives and Mothers, School Mistresses and Scullery Maids: Working Women in Upper Canada 1790–1840 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1995), xiv.
Joan Thomas, “Atwood Jogs a Murderous Memory,” review of Alias Grace, by Margaret Atwood, Globe and Mail, September 7, 1996, C20.
Cecilia Morgan, Public Men and Virtuous Women: The Gendered Languages of Religion and Politics in Upper Canada, 1791–1850 ( Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996 ), 197.
Judith Knelman, “Can We Believe What the Newspapers Tell Us? Missing Links in Alias Grace,” University of Toronto Quarterly 68, no. 2 (1999): 677–86.
See also Knelman, Twisting in the Wind: The Murderess and the English Press ( Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998 ).
Morgan, “‘When Bad Men Conspire, Good Men Must Unite!’: Gender and Political Discourses in Upper Canada, 1820s–1830s,” in Gendered Pasts: Historical Essays in Femininity and Masculinity in Canada, ed. Kathryn MacPherson, Cecilia Morgan, and Nancy M. Forestell ( Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1999 ), 14–15.
For a discussion of how the novel’s handling of “representation, media construction and the ensuing power play” to twentieth-century concerns, see Susanne Becker, “Celebrity, or a Disneyland of the Soul: Margaret Atwood and the Media,” in Margaret Atwood: Works and Impact, ed. Reingard M. Nischik (Toronto: Anansi, 2000), 28–40.
Gillian Siddall, “‘That Is What I Told Dr. Jordan…’: Public Constructions and Private Disruptions in Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace,” Essays on Canadian Writing 81 (2004): 89.
Roxanne Rimstead, “Working-Class Intruders: Female Domestics in Kamouraska and Alias Grace,” Canadian Literature 175 (2002): 45.
Examples of critical readings that take this approach include Cristie March, “Crimson Silks and New Potatoes: The Heteroglossic Power of the Object in Atwood’s Alias Grace,” Studies in Canadian Literature 22, no. 2 (1997): 66–82;
Hilde Staels, “Intertexts of Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace,” Modern Fiction Studies 44, no. 2 (2000): 430.
Peter Burke, “History of Events and the Revival of Narrative,” in New Perspectives on Historical Writing, ed. Peter Burke (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991 ), 238.
Simon Schama, Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1989), xv.
David Carr, Time, Narrative, and History ( Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1986 ), 13–17.
Barbara Hanawalt and Luise White, review of Dead Certainties, by Simon Schama, American Historical Review 98, no. 1 (1993): 121–23.
Karen Halttunen, review of Dead Certainties, by Simon Schama, Journal of American History 79, no. 2 (1992): 631.
Gordon S. Wood, “Novel History,” New York Review of Books 38, no. 12 (1991): 15.
Louis P. Masur, review of Dead Certainties, by Simon Schama, The William and Mary Quarterly 49, no. 1 (1992): 125.
Cushing Strout, “Border Crossings: History, Fiction, and Dead Certainties,” History and Theory 31, no. 2 (1992): 157–58.
Caroline Rosenthal, “Canonizing Atwood: Her Impact on Teaching in the US, Canada, and Europe,” in Nischik, Margaret Atwood, 46. See also Rosenthal’s citations of John Gray’s Lost in North America: The Imaginary Canadian in the American Dream ( Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1994 ).
John Demos, “In Search of Reasons for Historians to Read Novels,” American Historical Review 103, no. 5 (1998): 1526–29;
Lynn Hunt, “‘No Longer an Evenly Flowing River’: Time, History, and the Novel,” American Historical Review 103, no. 5 (1998): 1519;
Jonathan D. Spence, “Margaret Atwood and the Edges of History,” American Historical Review 103, no. 5 (1998): 1522–25.
Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995 ), 91.
JoAnn McCaig, Reading In: Alice Munro’s Archives ( Kitchener-Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2002 ), 58.
McCaig, “Alice Munro’s Agency: The Virginia Barber Correspondence, 1976–83,” Essays on Canadian Writing 66 (1998): 81–102.
Carol L. Beran, “Jabbing Sentences,” review of Reading In: Alice Munro’s Archives, by JoAnn McCaig, Essays on Canadian Writing 33 (2003): 39.
Earl G. Ingersoll, “Waltzing Again,” in Margaret Atwood: Conversations, ed. Earl G. Ingersoll ( Willowdale, ON: Firefly, 1990 ), 236–37.
Peter Oliver, “Terror to Evil-Doers”: Prisons and Punishments in Nineteenth-Century Ontario ( Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998 ).
Justin D. Edwards, Gothic Canada: Reading the Spectre of a National Literature ( Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2005 ), 101.
Howells, “Margaret Atwood: Alias Grace,” in Where Are the Voices Coming From? Canadian Culture and the Legacies of History, ed. Coral Ann Howells (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004 ), 36.
Burkhard Niederhoff, “How to Do Things with History: Researching Lives in Carol Shields’ Swann and Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace,” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 35, no. 2 (2000): 72, 82.
Douglas Daymond and Leslie Monkman, eds., Canadian Novelists and the Novel (Ottawa, ON: Borealis, 1981), qtd. in Gerson, A Purer Taste, 31–32.
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© 2014 Renée Hulan
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Hulan, R. (2014). Margaret Atwood in Search of Things Past. In: Canadian Historical Writing. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137398895_3
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