| This dissertation considers the diverse ways in which literary texts written in Canada between the final decades of the eighteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth mapped the emerging country. Drawing from the disciplines of critical cartography, history, and postcolonial theory, it analyses a selection of poetry and prose that produced not only aesthetically pleasing landscapes, but also contained and navigable territories. Attending to how writers worked to inscribe the land with new meaning, it describes the convergence of literary and cartographic concerns in the transformation of colonized space into habitable place.;Keywords. Early Canadian literature, literary cartography, colonization, long poems, nineteenth century, Quebec, Upper Canada, Ontario, Northwest, Thomas Cary, Adam Hood Burwell, Susanna Moodie, Catharine Parr Traill, George Monro Grant, Duncan Campbell Scott.;An introductory chapter theorizes the relationship between cartographic and literary aesthetics in the context of colonization and the expansion of settlement. The five chapters that follow proceed through close readings of Thomas Cary's Abram's Plains, Adam Hood Burwell's Talbot Road, Susanna Moodie's Roughing It in the Bush, Catharine Parr Traill's Studies of Plant Life in Canada, George Monro Grant's Ocean to Ocean, and, finally, Duncan Campbell Scott's "The Height of Land," to elucidate the range of ways in which writers both reinforced and re-imagined existing relationships between settlers and the land in early Canada. Chapter One lays the groundwork for a postcolonial reading of cartographic aesthetics in colonial literature. Specifically, it examines how Cary and Burwell translate cartographic concerns into poetic practices, and how writing about land thus becomes part of a larger claim on the land. In succeeding chapters on Moodie, Grant, and Traill, the discussion turns to the ways in which these writers at once embrace and complicate this relationship. Scrutinizing the complex dynamics of settlement and its impact on the land and Aboriginal peoples, their texts underscore the challenges that settlers faced as they learned to read as well as to write the settler landscape. A final chapter examines the territorial imperatives that invade and shape Scott's lyrical poetics of northern Ontario. In the conclusion, the principal themes of this dissertation are revisited in the context of recent traditions of counter-mapping that continue to involve both maps and literature in the re-visioning of colonial spaces. |
