The Other Side of Dailiness

Why are contemporary writers of fiction in Canada so obsessed with photography? Timothy Findley's The Wars, Michael Ondaatje's Coming Through Slaughter, Margaret Laurence's The Diviners, and Alice Munro's Lives of Girls and Women all present the photograph as a virtual analogue to the act of creating narrative. Lorraine York examines four Canadian writers of fiction whose works span the literary schools of modernism, magic realism, and postmodernism. For Canadian postmodernists, photography becomes a means of examining, in an acutely self-conscious way, their need to break out of the traditional confines of narrative form.