A New Historicist Interpretation of The Imperialist

Sara Jeannette Duncan (1861-1922) is a prominent Canadian female writer in her time. Her novel The Imperialist (1904), dealing primarily with Canadian nationality, is a sophisticated epitome of Canadian society that is most authentic to Canadian social and political life at the turn of the twentieth century. The Imperialist, as a product of a historical context in Canadian literature, incorporates historical reality and fictional imagination, and presents an uncertainty and perplexity in the ideology of Canadians at the turn of the twentieth century. Positioning The Imperialist in the context of New Historicism, this essay explores the intertextuality of the “historicity of texts” and the “textuality of history”. Furthermore, the essay investigates the circulation between literary text of The Imperialist and non-literary texts that surrounded it, revealing how literary text and historical-cultural context negotiate, circulate, and construct each other.