Abstract
Christian Riegel considers Shields’s theory of fiction writing, as expressed in her essays, in relation to how she articulates grieving and memorializing in The Stone Diaries. Shields is interested in engaging the complex possibilities of fiction to underscore the notion of the transformative female imagination as it relates to the details of the quotidian lives of her characters and emphasizes the metafictional, postmodern, and female, in particular. By reading through her essays, in her treatment of fictionality, the postmodern, and the feminine Shields suggests a theory of what fiction writing itself can be that extends beyond these concerns. Just as she resituates ideas about how women’s fictional autobiography functions, she too transfigures conventional elegiac writing to define the fraught nature of how women deal with death in the mid-to-late twentieth century. She thus engages the fundamental nature of what it is that happens when grief is encountered, when the dead are remembered, and what the role of language is in these considerations.
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Notes
- 1.
This essay is a slightly revised reprint of “Narrative Hunger and the Overflowing Cupboard”, appearing in Carol Shields: Narrative Hunger, and the Possibilities of Fiction, Edited by Edward Eden and Dee Goertz, Toronto: UTP, 2003.
- 2.
I discuss Kroetsch’s engagement with elegy fully in “Stone Hammer Poem” in “Robert Kroetsch’s Stone Hammer Poem: Elegy and Memorial.”
- 3.
Mandel’s complex articulation of a long poem as memorial structure is discussed in my article, “Mourning, Memorial, and the Yizkor Books in Eli Mandel’s Out of Place.”
- 4.
I give full consideration to how Laurence addresses the work of mourning in Writing Grief: Margaret Laurence and the Work of Mourning.
- 5.
See my essay, “Writing Grief: The Fraught Work of Mourning in Fiction,” for a discussion of Joy Kogawa’s engagement with literary memorial structures.
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Riegel, C. (2023). Shields’s Theory of Fiction Writing and the Limitations of Remembrance in The Stone Diaries. In: Stovel, N.F. (eds) Relating Carol Shields’s Essays and Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-11480-9_9
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