HISTORY OF CANADIAN LITERATURE
BBL5304
1, 2014/2015
AN OVERVIEW
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INTRODUCTION
Reflecting the countrys dual origin and its
official bilingualism, the literature of Canada
can be split into two major divisions:
English & French
But the writers and readers a purely
Canadian
This presentation provides a brief historical
account of Canadian literature in English.
CANADIAN LIT WHETHER WRITTEN IN ENGLISH OR
FRENCH REFLECTS 3 MAIN PARTS OF CANADIAN
EXPERIENCE:
a) nature
often emphasize the effects of climate and geography
on the life and work of their people
b) frontier life
a
part of Canadas experience that appears
frequently in its literature
Many authors have taken themes from the steady
march westward across Canada
Other have found drama in continuing battles to win
a living on the sea
Other have emphasized the ever-present frontier to
the north, the constant challenge to expand a
foothold in the Arctic
CANADIAN LIT WHETHER WRITTEN IN ENGLISH OR
FRENCH REFLECTS 3 MAIN PARTS OF CANADIAN
EXPERIENCE:
c) Canadas position in the world
French
Canadians often feel surrounded by
their English-speaking neighbours
They have made a determined effort to
preserve their own institutions and culture
But English Canadians frequently have a similar
feeling of being surrounded by the people and
culture of the United States
POINT TO PONDER???
The question often asked
regarding Canadian literature is
Is there a Canadian identity /
literature at all?
SO, CANADIAN LIT IS?
This has been an ongoing point of debate since
the mid-1800s, and still being discussed in
literary circles today.
This has been an ongoing point of debate since
the mid-1800s, and still being discussed in
literary circles today.
At the end of the debates, the outcome almost
always returned is that there is a literature
and an identity distinctly Canadian.
CATEGORIES
Canadian literature is often broken into 3
sub-categories:
1. Division by region or province (Eastern
Canadian Literature, Prairie Literature)
2. Categorize the authors (Literature of
Canadian women, Acadians, Aboriginal
peoples in Canada, Irish Canadians)
3. Divisions by literary period (Canadian
postmoderns, Canadian Poets Between the
Wars)
TRAITS COMMON TRAITS OF CANADIAN
LITERATURE
Failure as a theme
Humour
Mild anti-Americanism
Multiculturalism (Since World War Two)
Nature (and a "human vs. nature" tension)
Satire and irony
Self-deprecation
Self-evaluation by the reader
Search for Self-Identity
Southern Ontario Gothic
The underdog hero (The most common hero of Canadian literature,
an ordinary person who must overcome challenges from a large
corporation, a bank, a rich tycoon, a government, a natural
disaster, and so on.)
Urban vs. rural
PROSE AND POETRY
FROM SETTLEMENT TO 1900
The first writers of English in Canada were visitorsexplorers,
travelers, and British officers and their wiveswho recorded their
impressions of British North America in charts, diaries, journals,
and letters.
These foundational documents of journeys and settlements
presage the documentary tradition in Canadian literature in which
geography, history, and arduous voyages of exploration and
discovery represent the quest for a myth of origins and for a
personal and national identity.
The earliest documents were unadorned narratives of travel and
exploration. Written in plain language, these accounts document
heroic journeys to the vast, unknown west and north and
encounters with Inuit and other native peoples (called First
Nations in Canada), often on behalf of the Hudsons Bay Company
and the North West Company, the great fur-trading companies.
AMONG THE WRITERS ARE
Samuel
Hearne A Journey from Prince of Waless
Fort in Hudsons Bay to the Northern Ocean (1795),
Sir Alexander Mackenzie Voyages from Montreal
Through the Continent of North America, to the
Frozen and Pacific Oceans (1801),
Simon Fraser The Letters and Journals of Simon
Fraser, 18061808, 1960),
Frances Brooke History of Emily Montague (1769)
(the first published novel with a Canadian setting-an epistolary romance describing the sparkling
winter scenery of Quebec and the life and manners
of its residents).
Most of the earliest poems were
patriotic songs and hymns,
The Loyal Verses of Joseph Stansbury and Doctor Jonathan Odell,
(1860)
topographical narratives, reflecting the first visitors concern with
discovering and naming the new land and its inhabitants,
The Rising Village (1825)
The subject of prose sketches were
Immigrants, dreaming of a new Eden but encountering instead the
realities of unpredictable native peoples, a fierce climate,
unfamiliar wildlife, and physical and cultural deprivation
Susanna Strickland Moodie
Catherine Parr Strickland Traill
The most original poet of this period was,
Isabella Valancy Crawford, whose colourful mythopoeic verse,
with its images drawn from the lore of native peoples, pioneer
life, mythology, and a symbolic animated nature, was
published as Old Spookses Pass, Malcolms Katie, and Other
Poems in 1884.
The historical romance was the most popular form of
novel,
Seigneurial life in New France provided the setting for Julia
Catherine Beckwith Harts melodramatic St. Ursulas Convent;
or, The Nun of Canada (1824)
William Kirbys The Golden Dog (1877), (gothic tale),
Rosanna Leprohons Antoinette de Mirecourt; Secret Marrying
and Secret Sorrowing (1864) (depicted life in Quebec after the
English conquest in 1759).
MODERN PERIOD, 190060
In the early 20th century, popular poets responding to the
interest in local colour depicted French Canadian customs
and dialect,
the
Mohawk tribe and rituals (E. Pauline Johnson, Legends of
Vancouver, 1911; Flint and Feather, 1912),
the
freedom and romance of the north (Robert Service, Songs of a
Sourdough, 1907).
John
McCraes account of World War I, In Flanders Fields (1915),
Canadas best-known poem.
Torontos Canadian Forum (founded in 1920), provided an
outlet for the new poetry and the emergence of
Modernism. Emphasizing concrete images, open language,
and free verse, these modernists felt that the poets task was
to identify, name, and take possession of the land.
NOVELS OF LOCAL COLOUR & SOCIAL REALISM
By 1900 novels of local colour were beginning to overshadow historical
romances,
Out of the Prairies emerged the novel of social realism, which
documented the small, often narrow-minded farming communities pitted
against an implacable nature,
Lucy Maud Montgomerys childrens book Anne of Green Gables (1908)
Martha Ostensos Wild Geese (1925), a tale of a strong young girl in
thrall to her cruel father, and Frederick Philip Groves Settlers of the
Marsh (1925)
A tentativeness in form and subject matter pervades the novels published
during the 1940s and 50s and is reflected in their protagonists, most of
whom are sensitive, restless children or artists,
Sinclair Rosss As for Me and My House (1941),
W.O. Mitchells Who Has Seen the Wind (1947),
Ernest Bucklers The Mountain and the Valley (1952).
1960 AND BEYOND
(FICTION)
After the 1950s the tentativeness in fiction either became
itself the subject of the novel or was dissipated in more
confident forms of writing:
Robertson
Davies popular Deptford trilogy (Fifth Business,
1970; The Manticore, 1972; World of Wonders, 1975) examines
the growth of its protagonists into maturity within a Jungian
paradigm.
Alice
Munro in Lives of Girls and Women (1971), set in
southwestern Ontario, and Margaret Laurence in her Manawaka
novels (The Stone Angel, 1964; A Jest of God, 1966; The
Diviners, 1974) explored their heroines rebellion against a
constricting small-town heritage.
Leonard
Cohens Beautiful Losers (1966) probes the
relationship between sainthood, violence, eroticism, and
artistic creativity.
MORE
Mavis Gallants stories depict isolated characters whose
fragile worlds of illusion are shattered (The Selected
Stories of Mavis Gallant, 1996).
With
trenchant irony, Margaret Atwood dissected
contemporary urban life and sexual politics in The Edible
Woman (1969), Lady Oracle (1976), and The Robber Bride
(1993). Bodily Harm (1981), The Handmaids Tale (1985),
and the speculative Oryx and Crake (2003) are cautionary
tales of political violence and dystopia, while Alias Grace
(1996) and The Blind Assassin (2000), winner of the Booker
Prize, are situated in a meticulously researched historical
Ontario and expose the secret worlds of women and the
ambiguous nature of truth and justice.
Many writers publishing in the 1960s and 70s subverted the traditional
conventions of fiction, shifting from realist to surrealist, self-reflexive,
feminist, or parodic modes.
Although historical events and the investigation of place as an imaginative
source remained the most common subject matters, the narrative forms were
experimental and playful.
During the 1980s and 90s, writers also renegotiated ideas of self and nation
and of belonging and loss while breaking down traditional boundaries of both
gender and genre.
This period saw the emergence of numerous First Nations, Mtis, and Inuit
writers. Resisting the imposition of Western concepts of history, land, nation,
society, and narrative, many of these writers explored their oral traditions,
myths, and cultural practices.
A recurring theme is the individuals painful trajectory as that individual
negotiates between cultures, combats racial prejudice, and copes with
shattered families and kinship groups.
Jeannette
Armstrong (Slash, 1985, rev. ed. 1988; Whispering in Shadows, 2000),
Beatrice Culleton (In Search of April Raintree, 1983),
Tomson Highway (Kiss of the Fur Queen, 1998),
Thomas King (Medicine River, 1990; Green Grass, Running Water, 1993),
Eden Robinson (Monkey Beach, 1999; Blood Sports, 2006).
Other perspectives tackle the experiences of immigrantstheir
interrogation of the meaning of home and belonging, their feelings
of cultural assimilation and estrangement, and their
intergenerational struggles.
Nino
Ricci, a Canadian of Italian descent, portrays the long journey from
Italy to Canada in his trilogy Lives of the Saints (1990), In a Glass House
(1993), and Where She Has Gone (1997).
Asian Canadian writing has emerged as a powerful and innovative
force.
Joy
Kogawas Obasan (1981) is a skillful docufiction describing the
internment of Japanese Canadians during World War II;
In
Chorus of Mushrooms (1994), Hiromi Goto examines the relations
between three generations of women in rural Alberta.
The
poetry and fiction of George Elliott Clarke uncover the forgotten
history of Canadian blacks,
Dionne
Brands At the Full and Change of the Moon (1999) and Makeda
Silveras The Heart Does Not Bend (2002) construct generational sagas of
the African and Caribbean slave diaspora and immigrant life in Canada.
1960 AND BEYOND
(POETRY & POETICS)
Fueled by fervent literary nationalism and anti-Americanism, by the
expansion of new presses and literary magazines, and by the beckoning of
avant-garde forms, poetry blossomed after 1960.
Prolific,
ribald, and iconoclastic, Irving Layton published 48 volumes of poetry
celebrating life in memorable lyric lines and lambasting Canadian sexual puritanism
and social and political cowardice.
Many of Canadas novelistsincluding Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje,
George Bowering, Leonard Cohen, and Dionne Brandwere poets first.
Atwoods
The Circle Game (1966), Power Politics (1971), and Two-Headed Poems
(1978) are laconic, ironic commentaries on contemporary mores and sexual politics:
you fit into me / like a hook into an eye / a fish hook / an open eye.
The desire of women to express their distinctive voices and experiences in
nonconventional forms also resulted in a surge of feminist literary journals
and presses.
Collections
Di
by Marlatt (Touch to My Tongue, 1984; This Tremor Love Is, 2001)
Brandt (Questions I Asked My Mother, 1987; Jerusalem, Beloved, 1995)
1960 AND BEYOND
(DRAMA)
Canadian dramatists in their quest for a myth of origins have often turned
to historical incidents.
The
earliest forms of dramatic writing, Charles Mairs Tecumseh (1886) and Sarah
Anne Curzons Laura Secord, the Heroine of 1812 (1887), both based on the War of
1812, were in verse.
In the 1920s and 30s Merrill Denison, Gwen Pharis Ringwood, and Herman
Voaden struggled to establish Canadian drama, relying on the amateur
little theatres for support.
By the 1950s and 60s several professional theatres had been successfully
established, producing a more sophisticated milieu,
John
Coulters Riel (1962) creates a heroic figure of Louis Riel, the leader of the
Mtis rebellion in 1885.
During the 1970s, groups such as Torontos Theatre Passe Muraille
experimented with collective productions in which actors participated in
script writing and which were performed in nontraditional venues
The
Farm Show (1976), Paper Wheat (1978), 1837 (1976), and Les Canadiens
(1977); all exhibit a strong sense of locality, history, and issues of identity and
nation.
Green Thumb Theatre, founded in 1975, pioneered plays for young
audiences on such issues as bullying, divorce, and immigrants.
Influenced by film and questioning conventional forms and their
attendant ideologies, George Walker produced an impressive body
of work,
Nothing
Sacred (1988)
Criminals
in Love (1985)
Suburban
Motel (1997)
Norm Foster, with more than 30 light comedies (e.g., The Melville
Boys, 1986), has become the countrys most successful dramatist.
At the beginning of the 21st century, several collective and
multimedia companies emphasized physical and visual
experimentation akin to the avant-garde traditions in
contemporary Quebec productions
FURTHER READING
The essays in Literary History of Canada: Canadian Literature in
English, 2nd ed., vol. 13, ed. by Carl F. Klinck (1976), and vol. 4,
ed. by W.H. New (1990), are comprehensive critical studies, as
are the volumes in the series Canadian Writers and Their Works,
ed. by Robert Lecker, Jack David, and Ellen Quigley.
Donna Bennett and Russell Brown (eds.), A New Anthology of
Canadian Literature (2002); and Gary Geddes (ed.), 15 Canadian
Poets 3 (2001), are important anthologies.
Useful bibliographies include Reginald Eyre Watters, A Checklist
of Canadian Literature and Background Materials, 16281960,
2nd ed., rev. and enlarged (1972); Peter Stevens, Modern EnglishCanadian Poetry: A Guide to Information Sources (1978); Helen
Hoy (ed.), Modern English-Canadian Prose: A Guide to
Information Sources (1983); and Jane McQuarrie, Anne Mercer,
and Gordon Ripley (eds.), Index to Canadian Poetry in English
(1984).
FURTHER READING
The literature of Canadas First Nations is surveyed in
Thomas King (ed.), All My Relations: An Anthology of
Contemporary Canadian Native Fiction (1992); Daniel David
Moses and Terry Goldie (eds.), An Anthology of Canadian
Native Literature in English, 3rd ed. (2005); W.H. New (ed.),
Native Writers and Canadian Writing (1990); and Jeannette
C. Armstrong and Lally Grauer (eds.), Native Poetry in
Canada: A Contemporary Anthology (2001).
For drama, Jerry Wasserman (ed.), Modern Canadian Plays,
4th ed., 2 vol. (200001); Don Rubin (ed.), Canadian Theatre
History, 2nd ed. (2004); and John Ball and Richard Plant
(eds.), Bibliography of Theatre History in Canada: The
Beginnings to 1984 (1993), are helpful guides.
