A mind's eye view: The artist as mediator in four Canadian fictions (Alice Munro, Margaret Laurence, Margaret Atwood, Jane Urquhart)

This thesis is an examination of the creative process as it is depicted in four contemporary Canadian novels. By providing a close reading of Alice Munro's Lives of Girls and Women (1971), Margaret Laurence's The Diviners (1974), Margaret Atwood's Cat's Eye (1988), and Jane Urquhart's The Underpainter (1997), I show that each of these texts situates the creative process as the site of intersection between life and art. Therefore, my purpose within the following chapters (each of which discusses one of the aforementioned novels) is to examine the characterization of the artist-figure by these four individual writers; to investigate prevailing notions about the distinction between the real and the imagined; and lastly, to explore the creative process itself as it is represented in the life and work of protagonists Del Jordan, Morag Gunn, Elaine Risley, and Austin Fraser respectively. In emphasizing process over artistic product, these writers offer a glimpse of the pains artists go through in meditating fact and fiction. In other words, their novels lay bare the process of transformation, whereby the real---as experienced directly or through the admittedly unreliable faculty of memory---is turned into art, and where art subsequently allows the artist (and the reader or viewer) to reflect back on the real from an alternative vantage point, thus beginning the creative cycle anew.