THE ANTI-IMPERIAL GENRE PARADIGM OF THE CANADIAN POST-VICTORIAN NOVEL

Abstract

The paper offers a comprehensive analysis of discursive anti-imperial models in Canadian post-Victorian novels. The set tasks relate to detailing the features of this genre paradigm. In particular, attention is focused on the study of its historical, literary, and cultural context. The explanation of the socio-historical background typical of classical English Victorianism, provided in the paper, helps to trace the evolution of the related genre on Canadian soil. Its reinterpretation was prompted by the polyethnic and cultural ‘mosaic’ of the country, which became a prerequisite for the emergence of original models in modern sociology, cultural studies, and fiction.
 The study postulates the idea of an anti-imperial paradigm of the genre within the Dominion of Canada. Hence, the process of transforming the discourse of the Victorian novel into the post-Victorian one is demonstrated to be determined by the peculiarities of the post-colonial multicultural structure of the country, which manifests itself at the thematic, cognitive, psychological, and poetic levels. For the purpose of comprehensive analysis, the research is based on the plurality of historical and philosophical foundations within the field of ethics. The range of methods encompasses syncretic, cultural-historical, psychoanalytic, ‘close reading’, genetic, and gynocriticism.
 The study led to the observation that the social pattern of the Victorian era (a strict religious and moral code, the pretext of which was Protestantism, mysticism, etc.) permeated Canadian prose as an echo of English Victorianism. There was an ontological dialogue between the Victorian era and post-Victorianism, between individuals and the times in which they lived. The relationship between literature and individuals of different cultural and historical periods had an evolutionary character. The evolution of the genre of the Canadian post-Victorian novel, particularly in the works by L. M. Montgomery, B. Moore, and M. Atwood, is related to the multifaceted style, which involves the use of diverse elements from various aesthetic forms. This synthesis is the result of an experiment with both new and traditional literary models in Canadian literature. The correlation between the classical and post-Victorian genres shows the functionality of such means as satire, pastiche, and simulacrum in the latter. These tools transform the Victorian novel into an ‘anti-Victorian’ one. The examination of the modern version of the classical genre demonstrates the heterogeneity of meanings, their layering and transmission, a new role and conceptual load, motivated by purely national means of explanation.
 Over the course of an extended journey through time, the traditional Victorian models, adopted in the literature of the metropolis, had been transformed on Canadian soil. They acquired unique qualities, expanding the field of event and poetic content of the works by Canadian authors and demonstrating their solid post-Victorian anti-imperial discourse.