17: Realism and Parodic Postmodernism: Audrey Thomas, “Aquarius” (1971)

A udrey T homas, born in 1935, is one of the leading short-story writers in a period that may well come to be called the Golden Age of the Canadian short story. Like Alice Munro and Mavis Gallant, with whom she is often grouped, Thomas has been influenced not only by great international forerunners such as Henry James, Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, and Ernest Hemingway, but also by other Canadian writers and literary activists including Frederick Philip Grove, Sinclair Ross, and Ethel Wilson, who prepared the reading public for the international breakthrough of Canadian literature in the 1960s. Earlier, Morley Callaghan ( A Native Argosy , 1929; Now That April's Here , 1936) had introduced the Canadian public to the modernist style in the short story (Thacker 2004, 184), while Robert Weaver and John Metcalf had created — through CBC programs such as Anthology (1953–85) — a literary milieu in which short stories were regarded not merely as merchandise and entertainment but were also appreciated as a serious art form. Since 1983 some 600 short-story collections by individual writers have been published (Thacker, 190), and the range of short stories presented in anthologies, for example Margaret Atwood and Robert Weaver's The New Oxford Book of Canadian Short Stories in English (1995) is impressive. With this abundance of competitors, among them Alice Munro, Mavis Gallant, and Margaret Atwood, Audrey Thomas's success is well-earned. Today her novels and short stories, in which realistic and parodic elements interact in subtle ways, are highly regarded as sophisticated fiction (Davey 1986, 5; Gillam 1996, 2; Kleiman 2000, 660). Unlike the early Atwood, for instance, Thomas is not a cultural nationalist but belongs to the large group of Canadian writers who, having non-Canadian roots, add an international dimension to the nation's culture. Born in Binghampton, New York, and educated at Smith College, Massachusetts, and the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, she undertook a Grand Tour of Europe, lived in Ghana, Greece, France, and England, and traveled to French West Africa, Senegal, and Mali before buying a house on Galiano Island, in the Gulf of Georgia, British Columbia. Like Alice Munro and other female authors of her generation, she had to reconcile her profession with her role as housewife and mother (Munro 1998, x).

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