Introduction: “a monstrous leap of imagination”

For Daphne Marlatt's 1988 book Ana Historic, Lewis Carroll's writings are also important subtexts as they question conventions and playfully illustrate that what is real depends on cultural frameworks and individual perspective. As another contemporary Canadian woman writer who breaks down linguistic and narrative structures, Marlatt seems to share a lot of Audrey Thomas's aims and strategies. Like Thomas, Marlatt disrupts surface structures to defamiliarize accepted notions of femininity and to question the coherence and continuity of gender and sexual identity. Both authors mirror the process of identity (de)formation in the narratives of their protagonists who are both writers themselves. This makes the novels self-reflective, they tell stories just as they contemplate the conditions of storytelling and the correlation between storytelling and identity formation.