Canadian Literature

Article Outline

Introduction; Canadian Literature in English; Canadian Literature in French

Drama: Experimentation and Challenge

From the 1960s to the 1980s, English-language Canadian theater blossomed, partly as a response to the vital, politically committed French-language theater of Michel Tremblay and other francophone Québec playwrights. Theatre Passe Muraille in Toronto encouraged improvisational drama. A dozen other playwrights of substance developed, among them John Herbert, George Ryga, Ann Henry, Michael Cook, David Freeman, John Gray, George Walker, and David Fennario.

During the later 1980s and the 1990s, Canadian drama in English confronted rigid value systems, challenged racial and gender stereotypes, and experimented with dramatic form. Ann-Marie MacDonald's Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet) (1990) rewrote Shakespeare, giving voice to women's empowerment. Brad Fraser’s Unidentified Human Remains and the True Nature of Love (1989) and Poor Superman (1996) tore apart sexual preconceptions and misconceptions with their confrontational language and forceful characters. Sharon Pollock's Blood Relations (1980) uses the story of Lizzie Borden, who was accused of murdering her father and stepmother, in an examination of family relationships, social structure, and the difficult intermingling of the two. Judith Thompson’s plays, including I Am Yours (1987) and Lion in the Streets (1990), challenged accepted social values, particularly as they affect the lives of young women seeking independence, and dealt increasingly with failures of communication. Joan MacLeod’s Toronto, Mississippi (1987) studies various forms of victimization, asking its audience to rethink the nature of human compassion by dissecting family relationships that form around a mentally handicapped 18-year-old, while Sally Clark’s Moo (1988) offers an incisive and comic portrayal of a woman who refuses to be victimized. Cree writer Tomson Highway’s plays The Rez Sisters (1986) and Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing (1989) explore the social, linguistic, and sexual conflicts facing indigenous peoples. In the spirit of a Cree trickster character named Nanabush, who appears in both plays, Highway imbued his work with a lively sophistication and multiple issues and concerns. The presence of more native, black, Hispanic, and Métis authors in the 1990s drew increased attention to issues of ethnicity in Canadian drama. Dramatists who explored the boundaries and limits of ethnic identities include Drew Hayden Taylor, Monique Mojica, Guillermo Verdecchia, Djanet Sears, Maria Campbell, and Linda Griffiths.

Fiction: The Search for Identity

From 1940 on, Canadian fiction mirrored Canadian society in its search for a uniquely Canadian identity and voice. Both society and fiction were repeatedly influenced by nationalism, regionalism, and new ethnic sensibilities. The year 1941 was a watershed with the publication of two important works concerned with Canadian identity: Barometer Rising by Hugh MacLennan and As For Me and My House by Sinclair Ross. The former is an allegory about the birth of the Canadian nation during World War I; the latter is a tightly constructed first-person narrative told by a minister's wife and set in Saskatchewan during the drought-ridden Great Depression of the 1930s. Ross’s work reveals the psychological pressure of hypocrisy and a persistent conflict between art and religion. The strength of MacLennan's national vision continued to influence Canadian writing into the 1980s, and his determination to write of what he knew helped establish the artistic legitimacy of Canadian settings and subjects. His other important works include Two Solitudes (1945), The Watch that Ends the Night (1959), and Voices in Time (1980). Ross artfully crafted realistic short fiction, such as The Lamp at Noon and Other Stories (1968). Following MacLennan’s lead in writing about specific Canadian settings were regionalist writers W. O. Mitchell and Ernest Buckler. Mitchell’s Who Has Seen the Wind (1947) describes a boy’s childhood on the prairies of Saskatchewan, and Buckler’s The Mountain and the Valley (1952) depicts a boyhood on an Annapolis Valley farm in Nova Scotia during the years between the world wars.

Also writing at the time, but not substantially recognized until later, were Henry Kreisel, Malcolm Lowry, Robertson Davies, Ethel Wilson, and Mavis Gallant. Kreisel, who emigrated from Austria to Canada during World War II, used fiction to dramatize the pressures of conflict between old values and new ones in realistic stories, collected in The Almost Meeting (1981).

Technical Experimentation

Along with nationalism, regionalism, and new ethnic voices, technical experimentation—including innovations in language and form—characterized Canadian literature at midcentury. A second watershed in Canadian fiction, following that of 1941 with the works of MacLennan and Ross, came in 1959 with the appearance of two new voices, Sheila Watson and Mordecai Richler, both of whom extended the traditional use of language in Canadian fiction. Watson revamped Canadian prose form in The Double Hook (1959), a parable about fear, death, and the making of meaning, by using cadence (the rhythm of writing) and image rather than plot for communicating ideas. Richler had published two novels before 1959, but he made his reputation that year with a romping, bawdy novel, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz. The initiation story of a boy from a Jewish district in Montréal, it shows the title character pushing his way to success, alienating both Gentiles and his own family along the way. The novel’s vigorous colloquial language and comic set pieces further modified Canadian prose style. Richler honed this comic, colloquial prose in St. Urbain’s Horseman (1972), Joshua Then and Now (1980), and in what may be his most sustained and most sympathetic satire of modern mores, Barney’s Version (1997).

Further experimentation in fiction took place in the work of novelist Hugh Hood. In the sketch sequence Around the Mountain (1967) and the multinovel sequence The New Age, the Roman Catholic sensibilities of various characters in Goderich, Ontario, and Montréal, Québec, evoke what Hood calls the “super-reality” of sensibility. For many subsequent novelists, realistic conventions and optimistic expectations gave way to fragmented forms, antiheroic characters, surreal situations, and visions of violent disruption to the social fabric. Among these novelists were Barbara Gowdy, author of The White Bone (1998); W. P. Kinsella, best known for Shoeless Joe (1982); Robert Kroetsch, who wrote Badlands (1975); David Adams Richards, author of The Bay of Love and Sorrows (1998); and Audrey Thomas, author of Intertidal Life (1984).

Less obviously experimental writers who were willing to maintain a clear narrative line included Alice Munro, Margaret Atwood, and Margaret Laurence. Munro’s craft shows her transformation of the short-story form, particularly in collections such as Dance of the Happy Shades (1968), Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You (1974), The Moons of Jupiter (1983), and Friend of My Youth (1990). Her stories typically focus on women who are trying to make sense of their public and private lives, a tension articulated in the two-word title of Open Secrets (1994). Lives of Girls and Women (1971) and Who Do You Think You Are? (1978) examine with delicate accuracy the societal and familial pressures of life, primarily as they are observed in small-town Ontario. The Love of a Good Woman (1998) dramatizes the conflicts women face when they have made choices based on one set of social and moral values, and later find that the world has changed and that they are asked to reassess their lives and perhaps, wisely or not, to choose again.

Atwood’s feminist fiction, including The Edible Woman (1969), Life Before Man (1979), and Bodily Harm (1981), also amplifies themes of sexual oppression, primarily in an urban context. The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) conjectures about the terrible consequences for women forced into reproductive servitude in a dictatorship of the near future. Alias Grace (1996) draws its narrative from a true story, alluded to in Susanna Moodie’s pioneer journal, about a 19th-century Canadian working-class girl. It continues Atwood’s exploration of the roles of women in society.

Laurence’s work is for the most part lodged in Manitoba, in an invented small town the author calls Manawaka. The Manawaka cycle, a series of five books, is concerned with the intertwined lives of four generations of prairie women. In The Stone Angel (1964) and The Diviners (1974), which open and close the series, Laurence demonstrates her ability to orchestrate the different regional dialects of Canada and to construct a social mythology out of a relatively new Canadian society.

Multiculturalism

The multiculturalism of late-20th-century Canada is evident in the contributions by writers of many different backgrounds. Joy Kogawa’s Obasan (1981) and its sequel Itsuka (1990) examine the history of Japanese Canadians and the persistent difficulties arising from their forced internment by the government during World War II. Austin Clarke's several novels, including Survivors of the Crossing (1964) and The Origin of Waves (1997), address his origins in the Caribbean island of Barbados and the problems of race in Toronto. Bharati Mukherjee, in Wife (1975) and Jasmine (1990), draws on her Bengali heritage to explore the problems of adaptation for an Indian woman in North America. Her husband, Clark Blaise, wrote A North American Education (1973) and several other stories that draw on his United States upbringing and Canadian parentage. Blaise and Mukherjee also experimented with autobiographical form in Days and Nights in Calcutta (1979), a dual narrative about a year spent in India. In this book, Blaise tells of his discoveries as an outsider, while Mukherjee records her return as an insider.

Rudy Wiebe’s writing explores cultural boundaries and differences. He sought the sources of Mennonite faith in The Blue Mountains of China (1970), and the sources of passion and the power to persuade in stories such as The Temptations of Big Bear (1973) and The Scorched-Wood People (1977). The latter two are about leaders of indigenous people and of Métis, and about the difficulties faced by an artist trying to cross from the mode of perception of one culture to that of another.

Dionne Brand’s Sans Souci and Other Stories (1988) examines the racism and violence faced by Caribbean immigrants in Toronto. In Tales from Firozsha Baag (1987), a collection of short stories, Rohinton Mistry broadly satirizes the culture shock experienced by the Indian Parsi (Zoroastrian) community in Toronto and Bombay. Firozsha Baag is a Bombay apartment complex; the intertwined stories tell of several young men who grew up within the constraints of both the apartment complex and the Parsi community that dominated it. In the last story, 'Swimming Lessons,' one of the men immigrates to Canada, and in the new culture he must learn to “swim” all over again in an unfamiliar society. Mistry’s novels, including Such a Long Journey (1991) and A Fine Balance (1995), retain his humor, but they also look more deeply at the history and social conditions of the Parsis. In the latter novel especially, Mistry dramatizes the aspirations and defeats that punctuate the stratification of Indian society in the 1970s, and he analyzes the forms of power that perpetuate social inequalities.

Important late-20th-century works by indigenous writers include Beatrice Culleton’s In Search of April Raintree (1983) and Jeannette Armstrong’s Slash (1985), both of which explore in harrowing detail the social obstacles and racist stigmas facing indigenous peoples in Canada. Novels, stories, and essays by Basil Johnston, Lee Maracle, Alootook Ipellie, Ian Ross, and Lenore Keeshig-Tobias present strong perspectives on indigenous communities, language and identity, and cultural autonomy. Thomas King’s novels Medicine River (1990) and Green Grass, Running Water (1993), as well as his collection of stories One Good Story, That One (1993), are cagily informed by the trickster character of native folklore, Coyote. They combine deadpan humor with provocative commentary on the racial and social misidentifications inherent in North American stereotypes of native peoples. King dissects the mentality behind these dated stereotypes, encouraging a wry celebration of the contradictions that shape a person’s sense of self and place. Many of his stories question the artificiality of national and cultural borders.

Recent Developments

Two other important late-20th-century writers, Jack Hodgins and Timothy Findley, experimented with narrative form. Hodgins was influenced in his early works by American writer William Faulkner and the imaginative fabrications and magic realism of South American literature. In later novels he moved to analyze the forces that shaped the century and that threaten to stifle the artist's voice. In books such as Spit Delaney’s Island (1976) and The Invention of the World (1978), he transformed his native Vancouver Island into a mythical world populated by irrepressible characters, would-be storytellers, and giants of the imagination. The later work Broken Ground (1998) alludes to the same communities, but demonstrates—through multiple voices and points of view—how repressed stories of war and responsibility for violence return to disrupt the lives of every postwar generation in the 20th century.

Findley’s novel The Wars (1977) takes the reader through the dislocating experience of World War I, symbolically recording not a new future but the death of possibility. Findley’s Famous Last Words (1981) is ostensibly about a document written on a wall by Hugh Selwyn Mauberley—a character invented by American poet Ezra Pound—and discovered by a young soldier at the end of World War II. The book tells of the intrigues and quest for power that led to the war in the first place and that made fascists of both political rulers and ordinary people. Findley’s later fiction extended his inclination for revisiting classic tales. Not Wanted on the Voyage (1984) views the biblical story of Noah’s ark from the imagined perspective of Noah’s supposedly shrewish wife, while Headhunter (1992) relocates to Toronto the story of Heart of Darkness (1902) by British writer Joseph Conrad. Findley’s short fiction—including Dinner Along the Amazon (1984) and Stones (1988)—focuses on themes such as the power of memory, the decay of the family, and the loss of sanity.

Michael Ondaatje’s novel The English Patient (1992), the sequel to In the Skin of a Lion (1987), was awarded the Booker Prize, the United Kingdom’s most prestigious literary award, in 1992. Ondaatje was the first Canadian to win the award. His prose weaves together multiple threads of story and character to portray the complex currents of culture and history that individuals must negotiate. Ondaatje's earlier prose works, the poetic jazz novel Coming Through Slaughter (1976) and the autobiographical memoir Running in the Family (1982), mesh together historical fact and what Ondaatje calls “the truth of fiction” in fragmentary collages, a method that anticipates the woven forms of his other novels.

Carol Shields, a Canadian American writer based in Winnipeg, Manitoba, won the Canadian Governor General’s Literary Award, the American National Book Critics Circle Award, and the American Pulitzer Prize for fiction for her novel The Stone Diaries (1993). The story pieces together a woman’s life from historical fragments and conjectural fictions. Shields’s works, including Happenstance (1980), The Republic of Love (1992), and Larry’s Party (1997), examine the barriers and detours stemming from the fictions that human beings habitually tell about themselves.

Many of the stories in Guy Vanderhaeghe’s acclaimed first collection, Man Descending (1982), look back to the 1950s and 1960s in rural Saskatchewan, tracing the difficulties that confront a number of young men as they come of age. “The Watcher,” for example, portrays a young boy’s initiation into the compromises and betrayals of adulthood, while 'Cages,' which is perhaps Vanderhaeghe’s best-known story, examines the ways social pressures produce a form of spiritual claustrophobia and entrapment. The Englishman’s Boy (1997) satirizes Hollywood's romanticizing of the cowboy, dissecting the means by which films and novels produce artificial stereotypes that fail to do justice to the violence and hardship of life. The novel both literally and figuratively situates itself in the border territories between Canada and the United States, calling into question the ways in which national and cultural norms, such as the pioneer cliché “Go west, young man,” produce identities.

Much writing of the 1990s involved the re-examination of historical events, recasting them as fictions in order to investigate the moral dilemmas that inheritance creates for the present. Thomas Wharton’s Icefields (1995) goes back to the exploration of the Rocky Mountains for its setting. John Steffler's The Afterlife of George Cartwright (1992) draws on early contact between European settlers and Labrador natives. Anne Michaels’ Fugitive Pieces (1996) returns to the Holocaust of World War II and its impact on subsequent generations, and Wayne Johnston’s work The Colony of Unrequited Dreams (1998) explores ambivalence in the life of Newfoundland premier Joseph Smallwood, who argued for union with Canada in the 1940s. Something of a countermovement is suggested by another group, including Mark Anthony Jarman, Diana Atkinson, and Douglas Cooper, who focus on the grim and present-tense realities of disease, social inequity, street drugs, crime, and despair. Even contemporary children’s fiction demonstrates this division, with authors, such as Janet Lunn, dramatizing history, and other writers, such as Brian Doyle and Diana Wieler, addressing the modern traumas of adolescent choice.

Among the most popular and widely read of younger Canadian writers are Douglas Coupland and William Gibson, both of whom live in Vancouver. Coupland’s Generation X (1991) gave a name and a voice to young, disaffected urbanites who feel their lives are thwarted by history. Its story explores lives emptied of meaning in a media-saturated consumer culture. American-born Gibson combined science fiction, hard-boiled detective writing, and pop culture in a style that became known as cyberpunk. His novels and stories, including Neuromancer (1984), Count Zero (1986), and “Johnny Mnemonic” (1981), describe a world in which unlikely protagonists struggle against crazed technocrats and insidious computer networks, articulating deep-rooted anxieties over autonomy and power.

As the reputation of Canadian literature continues to grow, Canadian writers have an increasing presence on the international scene. Canadian studies has become an established interdisciplinary field at many American, European, and Australasian universities, offering opportunities to encounter the distinctive forms and perspectives of Canadian writing. New works in Canada continue to address issues of social plurality and cultural difference that inform a diverse and complex population. These works confront the tensions and convergences of French and English; of north and south; of indigenous, settler, and immigrant cultures; of nation and self; of race and ethnicity; and of gender and class. Canadian writing, above all, insists on investigating space and history: the ways territories are inhabited, claimed, disputed, and finally reimagined as the texts of people’s lives.

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Drama: Experimentation and Challenge

Fiction: The Search for Identity

Technical Experimentation

Multiculturalism

Recent Developments