Georgic, pastoral, and the ambivalence of history: Reading expectation and uncertainty in Canadian historical fictio

In this work, I read Canadian historical novels that evoke or rely upon the modes of georgic and pastoral as part of their articulation of a "sense of history." Informed by the genre theory of Fredric Jameson and Northrop Frye, the dissertation thesis argues for the inherent meaningfulness, the formal "purposiveness," of literary modes. Georgic, I argue, is a mode (in the sense of a large-scale trope or figure) of "expectation," an idea that can be seen in its conventional emphasis on work as process of cultivation, in its association with various forms of national projection, no less than its tendency to align itself with teleological narrative forms. In contrast to this, the pastoral---which embodies a "necessary acceptance of limitation"---is rather more equivocating and unassertive. Its customary contrastive and dialogical form makes it an effective means of expressing social and historical "uncertainty." Georgic and pastoral have repeatedly played determining and enabling roles in Canadian historical fiction, providing rhetorical and ideological frameworks from within which various conceptions of history and the "nation-in-history" have been articulated.