Fiction that reconsiders, challenges, reshapes, and/or upholds national narratives of history has long been an integral aspect of Canadian literature. Works by writers of historical fiction (from early practitioners such as John Richardson to contemporary figures such as Alice Munro and George Elliott Clarke) propose new views and understandings of Canadian history and individual relationships to it. Critical evaluation of these works sheds light on the complexity of these depictions.

The contributors in National Plots: Historical Fiction and Changing Ideas of Canada...

Rosanna Mullins Leprohon's The Manor House of De Villerai: A Tale of Canada Under the French Dominion is a literary milestone--it is the first Canadian historical novel, in English or French, to rewrite the conquest of the French Canadians from the perspective of history's vanquished. Its revisionary account of the fall of New France is framed around a love triangle between the heroine, Blanche de Villerai, her childhood betrothed, Gustave de Montarville, and Blanche's servant, Rose Lauzon. Popular in its original serial publication and once widely reprinted in both French and English, but...