Canadian Gothic Fiction:
Individual Authors


Margaret Atwood (1939- )


DAVISON, Carol Margaret. "Margaret Atwood" In Gothic Writers: A Critical and Bibliographical Guide, Eds. Douglass H. Thomson, Jack G. Voller, Frederick S. Frank. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001: 24-33. Investigates Atwood's close affiliation with traditional Gothic forms in her novels Surfacing and Lady Oracle as well as her other writings including poetry. "Atwood's neo-Gothic texts, with their subjective appeal and willingness to confront problems of Canadian identity as well as female wholeness, are striking examples of the Gothic spirit nationalized and personalized in modern literature."

GILLESPIE, Tracey. "Elements of he Gothic in the Novels of Margaret Atwood." M.A. Thesis, University of Alberta, 1990. Atwood appropriates Gothic traditions as they are set out by Radcliffe, Jane Austen, and the BrontËs, "using these conventions to question the sources of Gothic expectations as well as the results of the Gothic's pervasive stereotypes." Atwood's three most strongly Gothic novels--Lady Oracle, Bodily Harm, and The Handmaid's Tale--chronicle the lives of Gothic heroines who manage to break out of male-defined roles and forge their own identities, independent of patriarchal society's narrow parameters of female identity."

KIRTZ, Mary Krywokulsky. "Mapping the Territory: Figurative Modes of Didacticism in the Novels of Margaret Atwood." 0810].

MANDEL, Eli. "Atwood Gothic." 1294].

________. "Atwood's Poetic Politics" in Margaret Atwood: Language, Text, and System. 0813].

MC COMBS, Judith. " ' Up in the Air so Blue ': Vampire and Victims, Great Mother Myth, and Gothic Allegory in Margaret Atwood's First Unpublished Novel." 0814].

MC KINSTRY, Susan Jaret. "Living Literally by the Pen: The Self-Conceived and Self-Deceiving Heroine Author in Margaret Atwood's Lady Oracle." 0815].

MC MILLAN, Ann. "The Transforming Eye: Lady Oracle and the Gothic Tradition" in Margaret Atwood: Vision and Forms. 0816].

POZNAR, Susan. "The Totemic Image and the ' Bodies ' of the Gothic in Margaret Atwood's Cat's Eye." Year Book of Comparative and General Literature 47 (1999): 81-107.

ROCARD, Marcienne. "Approche gothique du paysage canadien: ' Death by Landscape ' de Margaret Atwood." Caliban 33 (1996): 147-156. [Gothic approach to the Canadian landscape].

ROSOWSKI, Susan J. "Margaret Atwood's Lady Oracle: Social Mythology and the Gothic Novel." 1298].
STEIN, Karen F. Margaret Atwood Revisited. New York: Twayne, 1999. Contains the chapter "Northern Gothic: The Early Poems, 1961-1975."

STOVEL, Nora Foster. "Reflections on Mirror Images: Double and Identity in the Novels of Margaret Atwood." 0817].

SZALAY, Edina. "The Gothic as Maternal Legacy in Margaret Atwood's Lady Oracle." Neohelicon 28:1 (2001): 216-233.

TENNANT, Colette Giles. "Margaret Atwood's Transformed and Transforming Gothic." 0818].

VAN VUREN, Dalene. "The Seduction of Genre: A Study of Organic Narrative Techniques in the Novels of Margaret Atwood." Dissertation Abstracts International 60:1 (1998): 137A (University of Pretoria). Studies the organic narrative techniques used by Atwood "to imbue her novels with a certain dynamism and originality. Atwood employs traditional forms such as the thriller, the Gothic novel and science fiction which she then subverts to break their prescriptive moulds of stasis. Many of her novels are open-ended or contain unresolved issues."

VINCENT, Sybil Korff. "The Mirror and the Cameo: Margaret Atwood's Comic/Gothic Novel, Lady Oracle" in Female Gothic. 0819].


Bliss Carman
(1861-1929)

MAC KENDRICK, Louis K. "Grues and Gaunts: Carman's Gothic" in Bliss Carman: A Reappraisal. 0812].


Marian Engel
(1933-1985)

TURCOTTE, Gerry. "Sexual Gothic: Marian Engel's ' Bear ' and Elizabeth Jolley's ' The Well.' " ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature 26:2 (1995): 65-91. Examines the use of the Gothic mode in Canadian writer Marian Engel's Bear and Australian writer Elizabeth Jolley's The Well. Gothic texts have always had a great interest in the corporeal and in the sexual. Engel's and Jolley's texts deliberately reverse or "corrupt" the orthodox, suggesting new areas of experience and new possibilities for "femaleness." 


Anne Hébert
(1916- )

CÖTÉ, Paul Raymond. "Kamouraska ou l'influence d'une tradition." 0809].

DAVIDSON, Arnold E. "Canadian Gothic and Anne Hebert's Kamouraska." 1290].


Alexander Henry
(1739-1824)

0000.VENEMA, Kathleen Rebecca. "A Rhetoric of Colonial Exchange: Time, Space, and Agency in Canadian Exploration Narratives." Dissertation Abstracts International 60:7 (2000): 2500 (University of Waterloo, Canada). Chapter 5 discusses Alexander Henry's Commodity Adventure, arguing that Henry "depends on a narrative ratio in which agency dominates time and space; that he deploys the cultural coherence of narrative forms, specifically in their gothic manifestations, to tell his story of a body in crisis."


Margaret Lawrence
(1813-1901)

STEIN, Karen. "Speaking In Tongues: Margaret Lawrence's A Jest Of God As Gothic Narrative." Studies in Canadian Literature 20:2 (1995): 74-95.


Lucy Maude Montgomery
(1874-1942)

DREW, Lorna. "The Emily Connection: Anne Radcliffe, L. M. Montgomery and the Female Gothic." Canadian Children's Literature/Littérature Canadienne pour la Jeunesse 77 (1995): 19-32. Compares the presentation of the heroine in Radcliffe's Emily St. Aubert in Udolpho with the heroines of Lucy Maude Montgomery. 



Alice Munro
(1931- )

BELYEA, Andrew Dean. "Redefining the Real: Gothic Realism in Alice Munro's 'Friend of my Youth.'" Master's Abstracts International 37:1 (1998): 67 (Queen's University, Kingston, Canada). "Alice Munro's 1990 collection of short stories, Friend of My Youth, belongs to an emerging sub-genre known as Southern Ontario Gothic. Each of the seven Southern Ontario stories examines dark psychological states, and each features ambiguous villains and an irresolute ending reflecting the protagonist's obscured sense of reality. Munro uses recognizably Gothic conventions, but the aspect of the Gothic that is most relevant to these stories is its tendency to put in question whether the terrors and disturbances that it trades in are predominantly objective or subjective, real or imagined."

MC COMBS, Judith. "Searching Bluebeard's Chambers: Grimm, Gothic, and Bible Mysteries in Alice Munro's ' The Love of a Good Woman.' " American Review of Canadian Studies 30:3 (2000): 30:3, 327-348.

John Richardson
(1796-1852)


GORJUP, Branko. "Noblesse Oblige and the New Man in John Richardson's Wacousta" in Literature, Culture, and Ethnicity: Studies on Medieval, Renaissance, and Modern Literatures, ed. Mirko Jurak. Ljubljana: Author, 1992: 127-131.

HURLEY, Michael. "Wacousta: The Borders of Nightmare" in Beginnings: A Critical Anthology. 1292].

________. The Borders of Nightmare: The Fiction of John Richardson. Toronto & Buffalo: Toronto UP, 1992.

MAC LAREN, I. S. "Wacousta and the Gothic Tradition" in Recovering Canada's First Novelist: Proceedings from the John Richardson Conference. Erin, Ontario; Scarborough, Ontario: Porcupine's Quill by Firefly Books, 1984.

MC LEAN, Ken. "The Dark Covert Mind: Wacousta." 1295].


Eden Robinson
(0000-0000)

000. ANDREWS, J. "Native Canadian Gothic Refigured: Reading Eden Robinson's ' Monkey Beach.' Essays on Canadian Writing 73 (2001): 1-24. Eden Robinson's Monkey Beach "calls for a fundamental rethinking of the significance of the Gothic novel for English Canadian literature in general and Native Canadian literature in particular. Her novel explores the role of the Gothic within the Haisla community and through a character whose life blends tribal beliefs and practices with an intimate knowledge of the non-Native world.".


Leon Rooke
(1943- )

GORJUP, Branko. "Perseus and the Mirror: Leon Rooke's Imaginary Worlds." World Literature Today 73:2 (1999): 269-274.

Aritha Van Hirk
(1954- )

BECKER, Susanne. "Ironic Transformations: The Feminine Gothic in Aritha Van Herk's No Fixed Address" In Double Talking: Essays on Verbal and Visual Ironies in Contemporary Canadian Art and Literature, Ed. Linda Hutcheon. Toronto: ECW, 1992: 115-133.

Sheila Watson
(1909- )

EMERY, Michael J. "Canadian Gothic: Sheila Watson's The Double Hook" in Canada Week Papers at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Ed. Joseph Weldon Flory. Knoxville: Center for International Education, 1994: 35-38.