SOURCE: Vautier, Marie. “Canadian Fiction Meets History and Historiography: Jacques Poulin, Daphne Marlatt, and Wayson Choy.” Colby Quarterly 35, no. 1 (March 1999): 18-34.

In the following excerpt, Vautier discusses the development of Canadian historical fiction and contemporary approaches to rewriting the postcolonial Canadian past, including the “historiographic metafiction” of Marlatt in Ana Historic.

In the late twentieth century, traditional methods of “doing history”—what the French historian Paul Veyne calls the “histoire-traités-batailles” school of thought—have been challenged by more contemporary theories regarding the writing of history. Scholars such as Hayden White, Louis O. Mink, Linda Gordon, and Dominick Lacapra have laid bare the assumptions that underlie traditional forms of history, exposing the occulted construction of historical narratives and proposing alternative means and methods of historiography. Francophone scholars have conducted similar investigations, as is evident in the work of Michel de Certeau, Paul Ricoeur, Paul Veyne, Marc Angenot, and...