ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the key concepts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book. Canadian women's fiction in the 1970s and 1980s is likely to face the problems of duality signalled in Professor Lotta Gutsa's title, Wilderness Womb: The Emergence of Canadian Women Writers, for origins is important but so also is the varieties of metanarratives through which Canadian women's fiction have emerged. Contemporary women write within the traditions they have inherited but they also write in resistance to those realism traditions, recognizing the need for their revision in order to redefine national and gender identity. The fictions by the eleven writers author have considered in this book are variant versions of this attempt, resulting in a network of features through which Canadian women's writing is constituted. The possibilities for contradiction and multiple perspectives are obvious and indeed they are a necessary consequence of the limits and range of this study.
