Interrogating individualism: Philosophy in the modern Canadian novel

The idea of the liberal individual that was developed in Enlightenment and nineteenth-century philosophy came under increased scrutiny in the early twentieth century. Modern novelists in Canada were active participants in this critical re-evaluation. They investigated both the individual and individualism as contested but enduring ideas in the modern world. "Interrogating Individualism: Philosophy in the Modern Canadian Novel" examines the ways in which Canadian novelists used the modern novel to pursue philosophical answers to their questions about the legacy and fate of individualism. These questions preoccupied diverse novelists in the early and mid-twentieth century, especially Frederick Philip Grove, Morley Callaghan, Irene Baird, Elizabeth Smart, Ethel Wilson, Sheila Watson, Ernest Buckler, Leonard Cohen, and Margaret Laurence. As these novelists investigated the challenges facing the individual in the twentieth century, they variously promoted, defended, and critiqued individualism as a good. In particular, they were drawn to five facets of the modern debate over individualism: responses to the death of God, the debate between determinism and free will, the crisis of liberalism in interwar politics, the political potential of authenticity, and the ethics of compassion. While modern novelists in Canada often engaged directly with individual philosophers, from John Locke and John Stuart Mill to Henri Bergson and Simone de Beauvoir, their novels show that philosophy in the modern Canadian novel was defined not by the influence of individual philosophers, but by novelists' desire to come to their own unique, nuanced, and literary understanding of modern individualism. Drawing on Enlightenment, nineteenth-century, and especially Nietzschean and existential philosophy, this dissertation argues that novelists developed an "interrogative mode"—a critical form of expression that unites philosophical questioning and modernist forms of fictional representation—through which they reimagined the liberal individual not as a stable or fully formed character, but as a "figure of becoming," who is spontaneously unfolding and perpetually in process, and who might be capable of a more profound ethical response to the complexities of the twentieth century.

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