Speaking in the Past Tense: Canadian Novelists on Writing Historical Fiction.

Elisabeth Anne MacDonald-Murray is a private scholar, writing and
editing in Souris, Manitoba.

As Canadians, we have long had an uneasy relationship with our own national history. We have fluctuated between an earnest desire to construct a unified national historical mythology that defines and identifies us as a nation and a self-deprecating, even self-demeaning, tendency to dismiss our historical record as inconsequential in comparison with the national mythologies of the Europeans or our American neighbours. Yet despite our typically Canadian ambivalence toward our own history—a reflection and by-product of our colonial past—historical fiction has always been a genre of significance in Canadian literature. As Herb Wyile observes in Speaking in the Past Tense, the genre has in fact undergone a significant renaissance in the past 30 years as Canadian novelists turn from the monolithic and Anglocentric nation-building preoccupations of their literary predecessors to a post-colonial and postmodern emphasis on the many and varied historical experiences of Canadians throughout the nation’s history, which defy the creation of a single, unifying cultural mythology. In this collection of interviews with 11 contemporary Canadian authors who have pushed the boundaries of historical fiction, Wyile provides a welcome forum for these writers to both reflect on their own literary engagement with the national history and explore the relationship between history and literature and the challenges of mediating between “fact” and fiction.

Following on his earlier work, Speculative Fictions: Contemporary Canadian Novelists and the Writing of History, Wyile moves beyond a critical analysis of the themes and textual strategies of historical fiction to a broader examination of the postcolonial approach to Canadian history in contemporary fiction and the role that history continues to play in the popular imagination. In his interviews with authors such as Rudy Wiebe, Jane Urquhart, and Guy Vanderhaeghe—writers who have enjoyed much popular success but attracted little critical attention—Wyile leads his subjects to discuss not only their literary choices and challenges but also their interest in and knowledge of the public and social history in which their novels are grounded. The result is a volume that provides a refreshing and valuable contribution both to post-colonial scholarship and to the ongoing critical discussion of the historical fiction genre.