Beyond Settler Consciousness: New Geographies of Nation in Two Novels by Margaret Laurence and Fiona Kidman

This thesis considers the role of geography in novels by Margaret Laurence and Fiona Kidman both as a structuring principle and as a key to their mapping of private and social consciousness. The spatiality of the novels is related to the tracing of a revised awareness of colonial history in the two settler countries in which they are set. The novels reflect not only the contemporary world in which they were written but also have continued bearing upon problematic pasts and the larger histories that shaped the cultures and societies of Canada and New Zealand.