II.

Canadian Literature in English

The European explorers who reached the island of Newfoundland on Canada’s northeast coast at the end of the 15th century were looking for a Northwest Passage, a westward sea route from Europe to Asia. Although their search was unsuccessful, one Italian explorer, John Cabot, reported back that the codfish off the coast of Newfoundland were so thick that he could scoop them up in baskets from the ship. European settlers soon arrived with an interest in trade or in converting the indigenous peoples to Christianity. Unknowingly, the settlers began to fashion a new society, but a literary dimension for this society grew slowly.

A.

The Beginnings

By the early 17th century both Newfoundland and French territory in Canada were home to playwrights, poets, and culturally active church men and women. In 1604 French settlers established a colony called Acadia on Canada’s northeast coast; this region would later become the provinces of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island. An Acadian culture developed under French influence, and immigration from Scotland in the 1700s brought Gaelic speakers and a Gaelic tradition of oral poetry to the region.

The late 18th century brought the two main stimuli that led to an English-language Canadian literature. The first was a British victory over French forces in Québec in the battle of the Plains of Abraham in 1759; the British takeover of most of New France (the French empire in North America) became official in 1763. The second was the outbreak in 1775 of the American Revolution, which soon drew northward to Canada many Americans who remained loyal to Britain. Canadian fiction in English had its origins at this time. The History of Emily Montague (1769) by English-born Frances Brooke is considered the first Canadian, as well as the first North American, novel. Written as a series of letters, it is based on Brooke’s experiences living in a garrison (military post) in Québec in the 1760s. The novel provides a portrait of 18th-century Canada while establishing a female literary voice early in English Canadian writing. Influenced by English poet Alexander Pope and French philosopher Voltaire, Brooke used the artificial conventions of the romance in her novel to talk of matters both fashionable and political.

The values of “peace, order and good government,” later sanctioned by Canada’s 1867 Confederation (union of the formerly British Canadian colonies), were articulated clearly by British Loyalists who emigrated north from the American colonies starting in 1775. These Loyalists (known in Canada as United Empire Loyalists) moved primarily to southern Ontario, the eastern townships of Québec, and New Brunswick. Towns such as Kingston in southeastern Ontario and Fredericton in New Brunswick became centers of political influence as well as of literary and educational activity during the 19th century.

Early Loyalist writers, such as New Brunswick author Jonathan Odell, who hailed from New Jersey, wrote staunch tributes to the British monarchy and corrosive satires of the American belief in republican government. Loyalist writing such as Odell’s work The American Times (1780), a series of satiric sketches in verse about leaders of the American Revolution, started a tradition of conservative thought that attempted to balance individual rights with those of the community. This tradition came to dominate Canada’s English-language intellectual history. It was countered to some extent by a second line of social thought urging progressive ideals.

B.

The 19th Century

During the 19th century, Canadian writers grew more numerous and more ambitious, attempting new forms and addressing new subjects. At first, writers turned to narratives that recorded exploration, settlement, and survival. By the end of the century, the range of genres and topics had broadened considerably to encompass social issues of the day—from the politics of independence to the rights of women—historical romance, comedies of manners, and lyric poetry about the transcendence of nature.

B.1.

Poetry

In the early 19th century, most Canadian poetry imitated earlier British poetry. Poets Oliver Goldsmith (grandnephew of the Anglo-Irish writer of the same name), Charles Sangster, Charles Mair, and Levi Adams exemplified literary ambitions of the time. Inspired by the love of nature of English landscape poets of the 18th century, they sought to express the natural beauty of their new land. Goldsmith's work The Rising Village (1825) is a book-length poem in couplet form devoted to the cause of re-rooting British civilization in Nova Scotia; his text alternately praises, satirizes, and sentimentalizes a pioneer settlement there. The title poem in Sangster's collection The St. Lawrence and the Saguenay, and Other Poems (1856) contrasts two kinds of river in two kinds of diction—one lyrical and gentle, the other rugged and winding—to suggest the difficulties inherent in capturing the new landscape of “o'erwhelming beauty” through the imported conventions of British poetry.

Mair's early work in Dreamland and Other Poems (1868) followed British models. As Canada began to expand after Confederation, Mair became active in opening the Canadian west for European settlement and in the Canada First movement, a political movement that originated in 1868 to promote national interests beyond the scope of the newly achieved Confederation. Most evocative to modern readers are not the grand intentions of the early poets but the occasional flashes of vivid, closely observed local detail in their poems. Goldsmith's Rising Village, for example, comes alive in its catalogue of the contents of a general store: “Buttons and tumblers, fish-hooks, spoons and knives, / Shawls for young damsels, flannel for old wives; / Woolcards and stockings, hats for men and boys, / Mill-saws and fenders, silks, and children's toys.…”

There was also a lively folk song tradition—found particularly in Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, and Québec—and popular writing in dialect. William Henry Drummond wrote poetry in the English dialect of French Canadian loggers and rural workers. Robert Service portrayed the life of gold prospectors on Canada’s northwestern frontier. While much of his writing was published in the early 20th century, its style and themes belonged to that of the 19th century. After growing up in Scotland, Service moved to Western Canada in the 1890s and worked as a farm- and ranch hand. His collection Songs of a Sourdough (1907), most of which is set in the Yukon Territory, includes “The Cremation of Sam McGee,” one of his best-known humorous ballads.

B.2.

The Confederation Group

The 1860s gave birth to Canada’s Confederation, and a group of poets born in that decade came to be known as the Confederation Group. This group led the search for native topics in Canadian literature. These writers, who knew each other but did not all work together, included Wilfred Campbell, Archibald Lampman, Duncan Campbell Scott, Charles G. D. Roberts, and Roberts’s cousin Bliss Carman. Campbell, Lampman, and Scott were civil servants in Ottawa; Roberts was a Toronto journalist; Carman made his reputation after moving to the United States. Isabella Valancy Crawford of Toronto was also associated with the group through her efforts to express a local mythology. The Confederation Group got its start when Roberts published his first volume of poetry, Orion, in 1880. Lampman, whom scholars generally regard as the deepest thinker and the consummate craftsman of the group, was impressed by Roberts’s clear talent that remained faithful to the local scene, especially the landscape of the Tantramar region of southern New Brunswick. Roberts's poetic skill shows most clearly in his sonnets depicting nature and in meditative lyrics such as “The Tantramar Revisited” from In Divers Tones (1886). In this poem Roberts focuses on details of place, ranging from the salt “scurf” on the “wide red flats” of the Tantramar marshes to the wooden “net-reels” characteristic of the working lives of East Coast fishermen. He went on to win fame during the 1880s and 1890s as the influential editor of the Week, a Toronto-based magazine, and as the author of animal stories.

Both Campbell and Roberts were torn between their commitment to local truth and their love of Canada’s connection to the British Empire. Although more poetically than politically, Lampman also revealed this divided heritage, especially in poems such as “Heat” (1900) and “At the Long Sault” (1900), in which the imagery juxtaposes wilderness and civilization.

Carman produced one poem of lyrical intensity, “Low Tide on Grand Pré” (1887), which touches nostalgically on New Brunswick scenery. It is written from the imagined perspective of French settlers expelled by the British from Acadia (territory previously held by the French) in the 1750s: “Now and again comes drifting home / Across these aching barrens wide / A sigh like driven wind or foam.” However, Carman's skills are predominantly those of the quick versifier, as revealed in his several Songs from Vagabondia (1896).

Scott has been regarded as the most experimental stylist of the Confederation poets, particularly in his use of the rhythms of speech in “At the Cedars” (1893). Many of his poems deal sympathetically, if from the outside, with themes from indigenous cultures. Notable among these poems are “Watkwenies” (1898) and “The Onondaga Madonna” (1926), both of which speak of indigenous women as members of a “dying race.” Scott was later severely criticized for his political actions as deputy minister of the Department of Indian Affairs, however. Other poems by Scott address themes of death, art, and historical conflict.

In striving to portray the Canadian landscape and private beliefs, the Confederation poets drew upon their love of English romantic poets, especially William Wordsworth and Percy Bysshe Shelley, whose works idealized nature and championed individual, imaginative expression. They also looked to Ralph Waldo Emerson and other members of the 19th-century American transcendentalist movement, which sought a higher spiritual reality beyond the world of the senses. Many of the Confederation Group's views on literature can be found in the columns they wrote for the Toronto Globe newspaper, starting in 1892; these writings were later reprinted in the book At the Mermaid Inn (1979).

B.3.

Fiction

Fiction writers struggled with some of the same tensions as poets during the 19th century. When the Canadian audience was small and publication of Canadian writing took place elsewhere—namely in the United States or Britain—Canadian writers tried to satisfy a foreign readership. Many fiction writers, among them Susanna Moodie and Julia Catherine Beckwith Hart, wrote conventional adventures that featured murder, love, and suspense, using foreign characters and settings. Hart’s dramatic tale St. Ursula’s Convent; or, The Nun of Canada (1824) was the first novel by a Canadian-born author to be published in Canada. Set in a convent, the novel is noteworthy for its use of what were then popular conventions such as mysterious kidnappings and mistaken identities. Hart's novel was the first extended work to appear from a Canadian press—Hugh Thomson's newspaper press in Kingston, Ontario.

With the founding of local publishing houses, especially in Halifax, Toronto, and Montréal, new opportunities arose for Canadian authors. Some fiction was serialized, including Thomas McCulloch’s satiric accounts of society in Nova Scotia published in the Acadian Recorder newspaper from 1821 to 1823. These accounts were later collected and released in 1862 as The Letters of Mephibosheth Stepsure. Moodie contributed fiction to the Literary Garland, based in Montréal, during the late 1830s and the 1840s. Thomas Chandler Haliburton’s humorous stories about a Yankee clock peddler named Sam Slick appeared in the Novascotian newspaper. These sketches provided Haliburton with a means to criticize Nova Scotian political and social life by exposing its susceptibility to behaviors perceived as American—Sam’s abilities as a fast-talking salesman, for example. At the same time, he could celebrate Nova Scotia’s British connections, including its judicial system and its independent-mindedness as demonstrated by its reluctance to become incorporated into either New England or the Canadas. The Sam Slick stories were published later as The Clockmaker in three series (1836, 1838, 1840), as The Attaché (1843), and under other titles. These stories contributed many familiar expressions to English speech, including upper crust, conniption fit, and stick-in-the-mud. The stories’ wide success overshadowed another, and for many people a more enduring, collection of Haliburton’s writings about Nova Scotia, The Old Judge (1849). This work gathers a variety of story forms, including vernacular anecdote, legend, and romance, all held together by the narrative frame. The whole work celebrates the coherence of Nova Scotia’s diverse population.

Some critics found the major developments in 19th-century Canadian fiction in the romance, a form that typically glorifies the deeds and personalities of the past. Canadian-born John Richardson, an officer in the British army, set his Wacousta (1832) in and near Fort Detroit during an uprising of the native peoples against the British that began in 1763. While concerned with the conflicts between imperial British forces and native peoples, and with a metaphoric battle between civilization and wilderness, Wacousta is much more effective when read as a nightmarish tale of romance and revenge. The book’s main character, Wacousta, is a Scotsman originally named Reginald Morton who allies himself with the native peoples rebelling against British rule. Wacousta seeks vengeance against his archenemy, Colonel De Haldimar, who serves with the British forces; the novel culminates in a number of violent and gory conflicts.

Both William Kirby in The Golden Dog (1877) and Gilbert Parker in The Seats of the Mighty (1896) romanticize the refinement and charm of French society in Québec. They also criticize the excesses of French society by equipping it with darkly mysterious and melodramatic trappings, such as cryptic messages, underground passages, and villainous behavior. Both historical adventure tales take place at the time of the Seven Years’ War, which ended with France ceding most of its Canadian territories to Britain in 1763.

Rosanna Leprohon’s Antoinette de Mirecourt (1864) presents a set of domestic scenes portraying the life of Canadian women in the 1760s, just after the loss of French territory in North America to the British. Antoinette de Mirecourt held both moral and political implications for readers of the 1860s, a time when predominantly English-speaking Upper Canada (now Ontario) and predominantly French-speaking Lower Canada (now Québec) were working out the problems of political and cultural union. In the novel, a young Catholic Québécoise marries a Protestant military officer against the will of her family, only to regret what she comes to regard as the sinfulness of her decision.

Toward the end of the 19th century, an antiromantic trend began with the publication of A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder (1888) by James De Mille. Set in the Antarctic, the story satirizes utopian sentiments in its portrayal of the society of a kindly, though death-loving, cannibalistic people called the Kosekin. This antiromantic trend continued in the 1890s and early 1900s in the social comedies of Sara Jeannette Duncan; the ironic and often comic depictions of childhood by Lucy Maud Montgomery in Anne of Green Gables (1908) and other works; and the popular urban satires of largely forgotten writers such as Grant Allen and Albert Hickman.

For most of the late 19th and early 20th century, however, the dominant pattern in Canadian fiction was the depiction and celebration of the wilderness—a depiction that denied the new society's increasingly urban face. The Kindred of the Wild (1902) by Charles G. D. Roberts is typical of such works, as is Ernest Thompson Seton's Wild Animals I Have Known (1898). Moral tales of frontier adventure, such as The Sky Pilot (1899) by Presbyterian minister Charles William Gordon (using the pseudonym Ralph Connor), depict good overcoming evil. Both Norman Duncan, a journalist, and Wilfred Grenfell, a medical doctor, wrote adventure tales set in Newfoundland and Labrador. Duncan’s work The Way of the Sea (1903) and Grenfell’s Adrift on an Ice-Pan (1909) were based on men’s experiences living and working there.

B.4.

Personal Narratives

Of all 18th- and 19th-century genres in Canadian literature, personal narratives have attracted the most attention from 20th-century readers and scholars, as shown by the numbers of reprints, scholarly editions, and critical articles. This attention can be attributed to the sheer awesomeness of the experiences these narratives record, the vicarious adventure they provide, the glimpses of history and cultural root-taking they offer, and the literary vigor they exhibit, characterized by direct and familiar language. Personal narratives include journals written by explorers, travelers, and settlers; autobiographies and diaries of pioneers and politicians; and short sketches and personal anecdotes that originally appeared in regional periodicals. In these works, writers responded to their environments with a level of precise detail that was missing in most fiction of the same period.

The most notable explorers’ and travelers’ journals include those by Samuel Hearne, Alexander Mackenzie, David Thompson, and Alexander Henry. Hearne, a trader with the Hudson’s Bay Company, wrote one of the first great Canadian travel journals: Journey from Prince of Wales’s Fort in Hudson’s Bay to the Northern Ocean … (1795). Although written at the end of the 18th century, it began a tradition that continued through the 19th century. In this journal Hearne describes his journey from Prince of Wales Fort, in Manitoba, to the Arctic Ocean in search of copper deposits, commenting on geographic features and indigenous peoples he encountered along the way. What particularly intrigues contemporary readers is Hearne's role in observing, apparently with impartiality, a violent episode in which an Inuit camp is attacked by another indigenous group, the Dene. Hearne’s description of it has been reprinted as “The Slaughter of the Esquimaux.”

Mackenzie, a fur-trading businessman, was the first white person known to have explored North America north of Mexico by overland journey, crossing the Canadian Rocky Mountains and reaching the Pacific Ocean in 1793. The magnitude of Mackenzie’s transcontinental travels inspired wonder even from his contemporaries. His journals were published in 1801 as Voyages … Through the Continent of North America. Henry’s skill at narrative is apparent in Travels and Adventures in Canada and in the Indian Territories … (1809), an animated firsthand account of the 1763 massacre of the English garrison at Fort Michilimackinac, in what is now the state of Michigan.

Thompson, an explorer and surveyor, has been called one of the finest early literary stylists because of the elements of autobiography and thoughtful, direct observation in his field journals. These journals were compiled and published as Narrative of His Explorations in Western North America 1784-1812 (1916), and later went through several modern editions. Many subsequent writers, including the poets John Newlove, Al Purdy, and Don Gutteridge, have made Hearne, Thompson, and other explorers central figures in their work.

The personal narratives of Susanna Moodie were written from the perspective of a settler. She and her husband emigrated from England to Upper Canada (now Ontario) in 1832. Moodie was a member of an active literary family; her brother, Samuel Strickland, and sister, Catharine Parr Traill, were also writers and immigrated to Ontario. Moodie recorded her experiences in a series of sketches published as Roughing It in the Bush (1852). These sketches include anecdotal descriptions of fire, planting, death, climate, neighbors, and local customs. They record the conflict between Moodie’s romanticized expectations of country life and the actuality of the rigors of the wilderness. Roughing It in the Bush closes by warning middle-class English men and women not to emigrate. Moodie and her family eventually settled in the small but growing town of Belleville, and in her 1871 revision of the book not only does she acknowledges the changes that had taken place in the society around her, but she also reveals a growth in her own independence and commitment to Canada. Traill established her reputation as a children’s author and a naturalist. Her memoir, The Backwoods of Canada (1836), takes the form of letters to family and friends back in England describing her experiences as a pioneer. Her writings also provide practical advice and creative solutions to many of the difficulties that prospective settlers were likely to encounter.

Pioneer journals from the Canadian west did not appear in print until the early 20th century because settlement occurred later in the west than in the east. Pioneers to British Columbia and Alberta who produced journals include Susan Allison, Monica Storrs, and Georgina Binnie-Clark.

B.5.

The Early 20th Century

Throughout the 19th and early 20th century, each wave of newcomers to Canada—British, French, Eastern European, South and East Asian—either learned to adapt to the land, the wilderness, and provincial life, or severed itself from that life. In the process, each new group either helped develop a language equipped to realistically render the experiences of the new nation or continued to emulate the fashions that were set elsewhere. Canadian literature throughout the 20th century continued to reflect this tension between the idea of progress—represented variously by technology, literary experiment, and social reform—and a commitment to tradition, in the form of received literary conventions, religious faith, and social institutions.

C.

Humor and Social Criticism

The works of Odell, Haliburton, and De Mille had sounded an early note of wit and social criticism in Canadian writing. But toward the end of the 19th century there were signs of that wit becoming formulaic and conventionalized, partly because it was demanded by the magazines in which such work appeared. Writers such as Edward William Thomson, Robert Barr, and Grant Allen, who sought to publish in American and British periodicals, produced polished if not enduring stories about amorality (the absence of moral standards) in society and city life. This trend in their writing failed to gain dominance, however. One reason was the success of writers such as Stephen Leacock in humorously debunking the conventions used by Barr and Allen. In Nonsense Novels (1911), for example, Leacock parodied 19th-century literary forms such as melodrama, dialect anecdote, and romance-adventure. In Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich (1914) he punctured the pretenses to sophistication of the urban rich by showing those pretenses to be nothing more than ego, faddishness, and greed. Another reason that the trend failed to take hold was an overall cultural impulse to identify Canada more in wilderness than in urban terms, a tendency that continued through much of the century. In his most coherent and enduring work, Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (1912), Leacock portrayed the foibles of small-town life, specifically the desire of small-town inhabitants to resemble their urban counterparts, whom they mistakenly took to be more sophisticated.

Leacock’s success tended to overshadow the artistry of two other worthy prose writers of the time, Duncan Campbell Scott and Sara Jeannette Duncan, both of whom address the comedy of human life, although they rely less on parody. Scott's “Labrie's Wife” (1923) and Duncan’s The Simple Adventures of a Memsahib (1893), for example, incisively deal with the ironies of mistaken identity in Canada’s north and with the ironies of race and class in British India. Just as Scott’s experiments as a poet had expanded poetic technique, so too his experiments in fiction expanded prose forms. In the sketch sequences of In the Village of Viger (1896) and The Witching of Elspie (1923)—set in Québec villages and on fur-trading posts—Scott depicted the shifting realities of people's inner lives as industrialization reached these once-secluded areas. The modern Canadian short story, emphasizing characters’ psychological realities, has its source in Scott’s work.

Duncan was a spirited newspaper reporter and extensive traveler whose writings furthered the cause of feminism in Canadian literature. Many of her works centered on an intelligent, independent female protagonist. A Social Departure (1890) is a fictionalized version of a trip Duncan took around the world with a friend. A Canadian Girl in London (1891), Those Delightful Americans (1902), and Cousin Cinderella (1908) wittily portray the lives of three young women, contrasting the different manners and mores of Canada, the United States, and England.

Later 20th-century humorists—including Peter McArthur, Robertson Davies (writing under the name Samuel Marchbanks), Robert Thomas Allen, Gregory Clark, Erika Ritter, Ray Guy, Sondra Gotlieb, and Eric Nicol—published in newspapers, using their columns to debunk current social foibles, such as technological confusion, gender uncertainty, and increasing Americanization. Paul Hiebert’s Sarah Binks (1947) parodies literary pretensions of grandeur, while David McFadden’s Trip Around Lake Ontario (1988) deals comically with issues of nationality and the American border. Some critics have asserted that the sharp sense of irony used by these humorists characterizes the Canadian literary voice.

C.1.

Fiction: War and National Identity

World War I (1914-1918) and World War II (1939-1945) altered communications systems, destroyed whole communities and much of a generation, and changed immigration patterns. However, by providing a common experience, the wars also provided Canadian writers with a means for expressing national unity. Examples of such war fiction include Charles Yale Harrison’s Generals Die in Bed (1930), which attacks war itself and the hierarchy of authority that sacrifices ordinary lives in the name of order, and Earle Birney’s Turvey (1949), which satirizes the Canadian intelligence service. Barometer Rising (1941) by Hugh MacLennan uses the Halifax explosion of 1917, when a Belgian ship and a French munitions ship collided and exploded in the Halifax harbor, as an allegory of war and as a defining moment in national self-awareness.

Many popular writers of the 1920s and 1930s provided escape for their readers through romances set in the past. But even period romances often commented, although sometimes indirectly, on the disruption and disorder that followed the wars. Among these works are the rural and historical narratives of Frederick Niven, such as Mine Inheritance (1940), and the pro-British Empire saga of the fictional Whiteoaks family of Ontario, beginning with Jalna (1927), by Mazo de la Roche. But other works explored sterner realities, as for example Douglas Durkin’s work The Magpie (1923). Durkin criticized Canada’s urban, economic, and sociopolitical structures in depicting a war veteran’s struggles to rebuild his life after World War I. Martha Ostenso’s Wild Geese (1925) reveals the constricted lives of women in a small rural community. Irene Baird's Waste Heritage (1939) portrays conflicts between individuals and industry during the Great Depression of the 1930s. The autobiographical Confessions of an Immigrant's Daughter (1939), by Laura Goodman Salverson, renders in realistic detail the efforts of a community of Icelandic settlers in Canada to maintain its identity.

Preoccupation with Europe colored the work of the two most important prose writers of the time, Frederick Philip Grove and Morley Callaghan. Grove's life was perhaps even more interesting than his fiction. His so-called autobiography, In Search of Myself (1946), is a tissue of fiction; he invented a European past for himself that went unchallenged until a biography of Grove, FPG, was published by Canadian literary scholar D. O. Spettigue in 1973. Spettigue showed that Grove was the name adopted by German translator, novelist, and convicted felon Felix Paul Greve, who had disappeared from Germany in 1909 and was presumed dead. In 1922 Grove published his first work set in Canada, Over Prairie Trails, a book of purportedly autobiographical essays about travels over the Manitoba countryside. The essays use changes in season and landscape to explore a series of psychological perspectives. The work was followed by 11 more books, mostly novels about European settlers on the Canadian prairies, that record a passionate yet largely pessimistic view of human beings in stolid conflict with the land, their fellows, and themselves. Settlers of the Marsh (1925), A Search for America (1927), and Fruits of the Earth (1933) are representative of Grove’s accomplishment.

Unlike Grove, Callaghan did not strive to portray grand views of human destiny. In Such Is My Beloved (1934) and The Loved and the Lost (1951), Callaghan’s characters are ordinary urban people—priests, boxers, street workers, small-business people—who, in the name of something they hold to be good, find themselves in moral predicaments. In The Loved and the Lost, one character struggles with his desire for money and fame and his love for a woman who has rejected those values. In many of Callaghan’s works, social structures, such as the legal system, are portrayed as unable to distinguish the pure motives that have led to individuals’ social transgressions, and they punish the wrong people. A contemporary and friend of American writer Ernest Hemingway and a follower of the experiments in vernacular style initiated by American writer Sherwood Anderson, Callaghan published in avant-garde American literary journals of the 1920s and 1930s, such as transition. His sketches, represented in Morley Callaghan’s Stories (1959), are among his most lasting works.

C.2.

Poetry: Modernism

As Callaghan refashioned the concerns and techniques of Canadian prose after World War I, focusing on urban settings and social issues, a group of poets and painters rose to challenge Canadian wilderness mythologies and the conventions of landscape art. The painters included Emily Carr, whose writings in Klee Wyck (1941) record her discovery of West Coast indigenous art; and Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven, young artists, mainly from Toronto, who advocated a painting style that was distinctly Canadian in spirit. These painters influenced poets of the period, particularly A. M. Klein, F. R. Scott, and A. J. M. Smith. These poets, along with poet Leo Kennedy, were known as the Montréal or McGill Group (after McGill University in Montréal). They published in the McGill Fortnightly Review, which Scott and Smith edited between 1925 and 1927, and other academic literary reviews.

The Montréal Group introduced modernism into Canadian poetry, incorporating techniques adapted from contemporary European and American writers. They emphasized fragmentation, alienation, and urban sophistication. Smith's 'The Lonely Land' (1936) melds the imagism (reliance on precise images) of American poet Ezra Pound with a depiction of northern Ontario landscape, while Scott's incisive lyrics, such as in his 1927 poem “The Canadian Authors Meet,” mercilessly satirize outmoded literary convention. Smith, who immigrated to Michigan, nonetheless became one of Canada’s most influential anthologists.

Poems by the Montréal Group were collected in the 1936 anthology New Provinces, along with poems by Newfoundland writer E(dwin). J. Pratt. Pratt, who was more than 20 years older than the Montréal poets, belonged intellectually and chronologically to an earlier generation. However, along with Smith he became the chief influence in Canadian poetry from the 1930s until the 1950s. Pratt's reputation was based on his stirring narrative verse, his extravagant comic rhymes, the intensity of short poems such as “From Stone to Steel” (1932), and his national mythmaking in Towards the Last Spike (1952). This romantic narrative, which describes the construction of the Canadian transcontinental railroad, adapts epic conventions such as the hero, the catalogue (list of items), the extended metaphor, and the idea of nation-building.

Scott and Klein gradually superseded Smith and Pratt in critical reputation. Scott, a reform-minded lawyer and political theorist who championed civil rights, honed the poetic use of the ordinary speaking voice in works such as The Eye of the Needle (1957). He also invalidated the aspirations of Pratt’s railroad epic, for instance, by pointing to the racial tensions that Pratt’s text seemed to conceal: One poem wryly asks “Where are the coolies in your poem, Ned?” (Coolies was a derogatory term for the Asian laborers who built the railroad.) Klein was a rabbinical scholar, an enthusiastic follower of Irish writer James Joyce, and a glittering wordsmith. He wrote intense intellectual meditations on being a Jew, attacks both subtle and brittle on prejudice, and clear-sighted reflections on the beginnings of nationalism in Québec. His work explored both the cultural contradictions of being “a Jewboy” from “the ghetto streets” of Montréal, as he wrote in 1951 in “Autobiographical,” and the fierce pride “of being Canadien.” He detects in this use of Canadien the threatening “body-odour of race” and racism, as he stated in his 1948 poem “Political Meeting.” Klein’s novel The Second Scroll (1951) is an eloquent parable about the wanderings of modern Jewry following the Holocaust of World War II.

As the Great Depression advanced during the 1930s, literary and political journals such as Canadian Forum and New Frontier championed reformist causes. Dorothy Livesay and Earle Birney were among the voices emerging during this period. Both published in these left-leaning journals as well as elsewhere, and they remained important in Canadian poetry through the 1970s. Livesay, a social worker, combined a political commitment to socialism with an increasingly articulate feminism. Her poetry is concerned with individual efforts to overcome internal and external forces of destruction. Her writing, as represented in The Unquiet Bed (1967), Collected Poems (1972), and The Phases of Love (1982), seemed to become more youthful and accomplished as she grew older, revealing a sensitive, understanding mind. Birney, a scholar of 14th-century English poet Geoffrey Chaucer, was adept at a variety of poetic and prose forms. The development of Birney’s poetry follows the 20th-century shift of Canadian poetry from its conventional, rural beginnings to experiments in concrete verse (poetry of visual pattern and impact) and poetry of pure sound that marked the 1970s. Birney’s David (1942), set in the Canadian Rockies of his youth, continues to captivate readers with its powerful language and intriguing story of a man’s search for truth through encounters with nature. Birney’s lyrical style and controlled humanism never faltered in later works, such as Ice, Cod, Bell, or Stone (1962) and Near False Creek Mouth (1964). His Collected Poems appeared in 1975.

C.3.

The Rise of Drama

Early theater did not foster a distinctive Canadian drama in English, although melodrama (drama characterized by exaggerated emotions, stereotyped characters, and interpersonal conflicts) and verse drama did enjoy a short vogue in the 19th century. Performances were often disguised forms of historical pageant, with an occasional written play, such as Sarah Anne Curzon's Laura Secord; or, the Heroine of 1812 (1887), achieving some degree of success. With the opening of Hart House Theatre in Toronto in 1919, however, opportunities arose for Canadian playwrights to have their works staged. Merrill Denison, who was involved in the early development of the Hart House Theatre, wrote short satires that exposed the emptiness of myths about the heroism of European settlers of the Canadian north, as in the series entitled The Unheroic North (1923). Bertram Brooker in Within (1935) and Herman Voaden and Lowrie Warrener in Symphony (1930) probed ways to dramatize philosophical conditions.

Several other playwrights emerged during the 1930s. John Coulter’s early plays, including The House in the Quiet Glen (1937), are set in his native Ireland. However, he acquired his Canadian reputation with Riel (1962), about Louis Riel, leader of the Métis (people of mixed white and indigenous ancestry). Riel’s failed rebellions in 1870 and 1885 came to epitomize the conflict between two cultural orders as Canada expanded westward. Gwen Pharis Ringwood was most noted for her dramas of psychological realism, Dark Harvest (1945) and The Rainmaker (first produced in the 1940s but not published until 1975). Drama of the 1930s also included socialist workers’ plays by various authors, which were intended to instruct. Some of these were collected in 1976 as Eight Men Speak.

During the 1940s and 1950s Canadian theater developed significantly. The annual Dominion Drama Festival, a cooperative effort of theater companies from all over Canada, was established in 1933. It encouraged the opening of small theaters, and the establishment of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in 1932 had, by the 1940s, encouraged the development of lively radio drama. The radio plays of Earle Birney, Andrew Allan, Mavor Moore, and Fletcher Markle marked the first sustained Canadian dramas. Moore's mother, Dora Mavor Moore, established the New Play Society in Toronto in 1947, while various regional companies and revues formed. New dramatists who emerged at mid-century include Patricia Joudry, Lister Sinclair, John Reeves, Robertson Davies, and James Reaney.

D.

The Later 20th Century

The second half of the 20th century witnessed increasingly rapid cultural ferment and social transformation, as access to media and communications introduced into the Canadian scene a growing multiplicity of voices, languages, and perspectives. Various modes of debate, dissent, alliance, and identification—combined with vigorous experimentation with forms and styles—led to the emergence of a distinctively Canadian multiculturalism. Instead of forcing a unified national consciousness of diversity, as happened in the United States, multiculturalism in Canada produced a literature that challenged and rethought the ways in which a nation can accommodate that diversity.

D.1.

Poetry

With the increase in literary and arts-related reviews in the 1940s and 1950s, new figures and poetic movements emerged that would dominate English-language Canadian poetry for the next three decades. The rise of new literary journals signaled new directions in poetry: an emphasis on urban and social politics, a concern with speech rhythms, and a resistance to conventions of rhyme and regular meter. Two groups of poets were affiliated with the Montréal journals Preview and First Statement, which combined to form the Northern Review in 1946. Two more reviews, poet Raymond Souster’s Toronto-based Contact and poet Louis Dudek’s Montréal-based Delta, began publication in the 1950s. Preeminent among other poets who published in these so-called little magazines were Irving Layton, P. K. Page, and Miriam Waddington.

In poems such as “The Cold Green Element” (1955), “The Bull Calf” (1956), and “Whatever Else Poetry Is Freedom” (1958), Layton created powerful and belligerent lyrics, combining social protest with biting philosophical skepticism. He disavows “the trick of lying / All poets pick up sooner or later,” and seeks instead a direct, committed voice. Souster, whose Collected Poems appeared in several volumes during the 1980s, proclaimed 1930s writer W. W. E. Ross as the father of modern Canadian writing, largely for his abrupt, disconnected style and his departures from traditional poetic forms. Souster’s own work follows in this mold. In “St. Catherine Street East” (1964), Souster takes the colloquial voice of a deli proprietor to describe having a drink on a hot afternoon in downtown Montréal: “Beer you said? Right back here / behind giant cheeses, weinerwurst truncheons, / hungry smells of bread, perfumes of coffee.” Locating poetry in the facts of street life, Souster prepared the way for the new voices of the 1960s.

In Europe (1954) and Atlantis (1967), Louis Dudek worked to develop the long poem as personal journal, a form that found more practitioners during the 1970s. Page's earliest poems and stories, many of which appeared in her first full volume, As Ten as Twenty (1946), explore the nervous states of mind of isolated individuals. Her later works, from “Arras” (1967) to the allusive lyrics of Hologram (1994), examine the processes of creating metaphors and the tensions between logic and emotion, and intellect and imagination. In Waddington's artfully crafted works, including The Second Silence (1955), The Season’s Lovers (1958), and The Price of Gold (1976), private dreams repeatedly conflict with social reality. Another notable writer of the period, Ralph Gustafson, began conventionally, but won national attention for his carefully crafted ambiguities and his reflections on music, nature, and science in Fire on Stone (1974).

D.1.a.

Mythopoeic School

Other trends in Canadian poetry of the 1950s and 1960s include the regional nature writings of Douglas Le Pan and Alden Nowlan, and Daryl Hine’s imitations of Greek and Latin classical texts. Of particular importance was the so-called mythopoeic school (from the Greek word mythopoeia, meaning “making of myth”), which drew upon the theories of Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung and Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye. Jung had introduced the idea of universal myths and archetypes (largely unconscious image patterns that cross cultural boundaries). In Anatomy of Criticism (1957), Frye identified and discussed basic archetypal patterns found in myths and literary genres.

Central among the mythopoeic poets were Jay Macpherson, Gwendolyn MacEwen, Wilfred Watson, James Reaney, and, in his earliest work, Eli Mandel. As early as the 1940s, Reaney had established himself as a cultural iconographer through his efforts to make people aware of their cultural assumptions. His first collection of poetry, The Red Heart (1949), examines how global mythic patterns situated themselves in the highly localized context of Stratford, Ontario, where Reaney was born and raised. A series of inventive verse-plays by Reaney includes a trilogy about the infamous Donnelly family of Lucan, Ontario, which was murdered as a result of a decades-old feud. Reaney called upon local audiences to be co-creators of the work with him by looking at their own history and surroundings and, in doing so, finding the mythological in the familiar and reinventing the past.

From the late 1940s on, Mandel explored the territories that personal experience could transform into poetry, in a series of intense meditative journal essays. Some of these were published in 1977 as Another Time. He also created a number of doppelgänger poems (poems that used the voices of possible other selves). These appeared in such collections as Out of Place (1977) and Dreaming Backwards (1981).

D.1.b.

New Poetics

Reaney’s poetic technique was expansive and cumulative, often drawing on older poetic traditions. His technique was, however, a countermovement toward compactness and intensity that became dominant in the 1960s. This movement took several forms of expression. It was politically critical in the work of Milton Acorn; private and conscious of aesthetic effect in the minimalist poems of Phyllis Webb; and Christian and stylistically dense in the technically masterful lyrics of Margaret Avison.

Avison and a group of poets in Vancouver, British Columbia, were influenced by the poetic theories of their American contemporaries, including the Black Mountain Poets (Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, and Robert Duncan) and William Carlos Williams. The Black Mountain Poets, so named after the college in North Carolina where they taught, called for the use of colloquial language and open form (no fixed meter or rhyme scheme). Williams asserted that a poem should present “no ideas but in things,” by which he meant that abstract ideas can be properly expressed only in concrete language referring to tangible objects and sensual experience. The Vancouver poets were known as the Tish Group after the literary magazine, Tish, that published their work. Chief among them were George Bowering and Frank Davey, both of whom sought to develop techniques of composition by field—that is, working with abstract arrangements of lines and text on the page in an attempt to catch the textures and pressures of the voice. Bowering went on to adapt the lush lyricism of German poet Rainer Maria Rilke to a Vancouver context in Kerrisdale Elegies (1985), while Davey experimented with the boundaries between poetry and critical writing.

D.1.c.

Regionalism and Nationalism

Ontario-born poet Al Purdy became a leading voice from the 1960s to the 1980s. He is known especially for his inquiries into Canadian regional life. Many of Purdy’s poems have a clear regional focus centered on the small town of Ameliasberg, Ontario. In The Cariboo Horses (1965) Purdy poetically maps out a region of central British Columbia by examining the layering of local histories in the common usage of everyday speech. In poems such as “Trees at the Arctic Circle” (1967) and “Lament for the Dorsets” (1968), he confronts the aesthetic and cultural barriers between a sense of personal identity and a sense of belonging to a place or local culture. Purdy was also a dedicated traveler, and many of his books reflect on the meaning of place as he encounters unfamiliar landscapes and contexts in Mexico, Japan, central Europe, and elsewhere. Purdy’s Collected Poems appeared in 1986, with an excellent afterword by fellow poet Dennis Lee.

In the late 1960s and the 1970s a powerful nationalist movement took root in Canadian literature, with its center in Toronto. Major voices of the movement included John Newlove, Dennis Lee, and Margaret Atwood. Newlove’s poem “The Pride,” from his volume The Fat Man (1977), reassesses the significance of indigenous cultures as ancestral voices for Canadians of European descent. The meditations in Lee’s Civil Elegies and Other Poems (1972) show the influence of conservative Canadian philosopher George Parkin Grant, who saw a Loyalist sense of loss and an American desire for gain as forces competing for power in Canada’s culture. Lee's influential essay “Cadence, Country, Silence” (1973) proposed colonial disenfranchisement as a source of the shifting poetic voice that Lee came to call polyphony. Atwood’s nationalism was overt in her early works, such as The Journals of Susanna Moodie (1974), in which she tried to reimagine the central Canadian landscape through the divided consciousness (English and Canadian) of 19th-century journal writer Moodie. Concerns with gender and power, and challenges to masculine models of authority and identity, run through such works as True Stories (1981) and Interlunar (1984). In Strange Things (1995), a series of lectures on ill will and insanity in the Canadian north, Atwood uses images of madness and exhaustion to portray the English Canadian imagination in need of renewal.

D.1.d.

Experimentation and Multiplicity

Many accomplished poets flourished during the 1970s and 1980s. The poet bp Nichol experimented with concrete poetry, which conveys meaning through visual patterns rather than through verbal description. The Martyrology, an open-ended series that Nichol composed from the early 1970s until his death in 1988, features the experiments with fragmented language that are characteristic of his style. Daphne Marlatt developed a distinctive feminism concerned with the relationships between women’s bodies and language, as in the series of writings in Touch to My Tongue (1984) that celebrates lesbian desire. Robert Kroetsch sought to reconcile a sense of historical continuity derived from growing up on the prairie in Alberta with the discontinuity of time and place that he felt marked the late 20th century. His fragmented reworking of Canadian literary history in “F. P. Grove: The Finding” calls into question the boundaries between the “real” and the “imagined.” This work presents, in jagged shards of verse, a pervasive uncertainty over the possibility of any stable truth or identity. Christopher Dewdney was born into a family of scientists, and he examined scientific explanations for linguistic behavior in texts such as Predators of the Adoration (1983). Robert Bringhurst drew on traditions of western European philosophy, Zen Buddhism, and indigenous oral literatures to produce a striking poetry of careful thought and verbal precision in The Calling (1995). Michael Ondaatje, in collections from The Dainty Monsters (1967) to The Cinnamon Peeler (1992), grafted postmodern literary technique onto real and imagined landscapes, offering his readers bizarre flights of the imagination, stinging investigations of American image making, and lyric confrontations with past experience. Other voices significant for their concerns with ecology, class experience, feminism, faith, place, and formal innovation include Don McKay, M. Travis Lane, Dale Zieroth, Patrick Lane, Lorna Crozier, Anne Szumigalski, Colleen Thibaudeau, Bronwen Wallace, Paulette Jiles, David Donnell, bill bissett, Tom Wayman, D. G. Jones, Pat Lowther, Eva Tihanyi, Stephen Scobie, Jan Zwicky, Roo Borson, and Susan Musgrave.

The 1990s saw the emergence of significant poets of various ethnic and social backgrounds. Trinidad-born Dionne Brand wrote No Language Is Neutral (1990); the title reflects an increasing awareness of the political and cultural pitfalls in finding one’s voice. African Canadian George Elliot Clarke presented a history of a black community in Nova Scotia in Whylah Falls (1990). The work of Daniel David Moses, a writer of native Delaware heritage, combines a deftness of craft and texture with a detailed awareness of the natural world. Moses edited, with Terry Goldie, An Anthology of Canadian Native Literature in English (1992, revised 1997). Lola Lemire Tostevin’s Color of Her Speech (1982), an extended bilingual poem, investigates the linguistic tensions between English and French through what the poet calls unspeaking or, in French, déparlance. Tostevin's text probes the social and cultural discord that produces a sense of self and place within a pluralistic framework.

D.2.

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.

D.3.

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).

Lowry was an immigrant from Britain who stayed for a relatively short time in Canada, yet he did all his major writing there. He is noted for Under the Volcano (1947), a richly textured prose work that recounts the last hours in the life of an alcoholic British former consul in Mexico. In later works, including the short-story collection Hear Us O Lord from Heaven Thy Dwelling-Place (1961), Lowry explored various versions of the paradise he hoped to locate in Canada.

Davies began his career as an academic wit, urbane theater critic, and comic playwright. His early novels, such as Leaven of Malice (1954), satirize what he viewed as Ontario provincialism. He gained wider recognition with the Deptford trilogy—Fifth Business (1970), The Manticore (1972), and World of Wonders (1975). The trilogy traces a number of lives that are linked by a small-town childhood, an interest in magic and hagiography (the lives of saints), and a conflict between political ambition and psychological balance. The entire trilogy and its many themes are riddled with stylish linguistic games and firmly rooted in Jungian psychological theory, specifically in the notion that psychological balance derives from a reconciliation between the archetypes of friend and enemy, anima (inner self) and persona (outward self). Davies’s later, and less successful, Cornish trilogy focuses on academic and artistic life in Toronto.

Ethel Wilson wrote of more confined lives. She focused on the narrow worlds of women who aspire to be middle class, mistaking that for gentility, and of those who flee the constraints of middle-class values in order to achieve, at whatever sacrifice, a true independence of spirit. Her novels Hetty Dorval (1947) and Swamp Angel (1954), as well as her stories in Mrs. Golightly and Other Stories (1961), have been rediscovered by scholars in the late 20th century for their polish and for the light they throw on women's experience.

Stories and novels by Mavis Gallant, many of which appeared first in the American literary magazine The New Yorker, range from reminiscent narratives to political analyses, from domestic tragedies to deliberately contrived ghost stories. Particularly notable are her collections The Pegnitz Junction (1973) and From the Fifteenth District (1979), less for their dramatization of incidents than for their psychological portrayals. In one story, a former prisoner of war must come to terms with changes in his family; in another, a woman surrenders the reality of memory to the artificial truths of official history.

D.3.a.

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.

D.3.b.

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.

D.3.c.

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.