ENGLISH CANADIAN
LITERATURE
Instructor: Ecaterina Hanţiu PhD
The Beginnings

Canadian literature developed
slowly. It began in the 17th
century and achieved its
distinctive character only after
Canada gained independence
from Britain in 1867. From the
beginnings of European
colonization in the 1600s until
nationhood, various factors
affected cultural development
in the territory now known as
Canada.
The Beginnings

From colonial times on,
European Canadians were
divided into two distinct
populations: Frenchspeaking and Englishspeaking. Although many
people were bilingual (as
are many Canadians
today), the partisanship of
these two groups, coupled
with large numbers of
immigrants who spoke
other languages, proved to
be divisive in any progress
toward a single national
literature.
Canadian Culture and Diversity

Rather than commit themselves to uniformity as the
basis of their culture, Canadians instead accepted
plurality (diversity) as a workable alternative.
Saint Lawrence River between Quebec City (seen at left) and Lévis (seen at right). The Île d'Orléans appears further in the centre.
Other factors that worked against a uniform
national culture
On March 23, 1752, printing in Canada was
officially begun with the launch of the Halifax
Gazette from the printing press of John
Bushell. Newly arrived from Boston, John
Bushell took over the operation of Canada's
first printing press in 1751. It was his
daughter, Elizabeth, who worked in the
printing office of the Gazette newspaper with
her father, as both a compositor and
presswoman.



As Canada’s boundaries
rapidly expanded, its
settlements became widely
scattered. This complicated
transportation and
communication, thereby
impeding the distribution of
goods, including books.
Canada did not have a
revolution as the United
States did.
Canada’s slow population
growth resulted in an
evolutionary process of
cultural development that
continues today.
Other factors that worked against a uniform
national culture



Canada has experienced
tensions as a result of
horizontal pulls across the
Atlantic Ocean to Britain
and France, and a vertical
pull across the 49th parallel
to the United States.
Centers of publication long
lay outside Canada.
Under such circumstances,
a sense of a separate
Canadian literary identity
was achieved only slowly
and with sustained effort.
The Literary Scene of the 20th century



By the 1960s, the Canadian
literary scene had blossomed.
More volumes of poetry, fiction,
drama, and critical studies
appeared yearly than formerly
had appeared in a decade. New
Canadian-owned publishing firms
opened.
In high schools and universities,
courses in Canadian literature
proliferated. Nevertheless, the
literary achievement of the 20th
and 21st centuries is firmly rooted
in Canada's literary past.
The Robarts Library is the main
humanities and social sciences
library in Toronto.

A statue of Mihai Eminescu in Romania's Square, Montreal, 2004
Most Canadian
literature is written in
English or French; other
languages in which it
appears include Gaelic,
German, Icelandic,
Ukrainian, Yiddish, and
the many languages of
Canada’s original
inhabitants, among
them Cree, Haida,
Inuktitut, and Ojibwa.
The First English Canadian Authors

Frances Moore Brooke (1723 –1789) was an
English novelist, essayist, playwright and
translator.
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 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.
Literature in the 18th century



The British Loyalists who emigrated north from the American
colonies starting in 1775 wrote tributes to the British monarchy and
satires of the American belief in republican government.
Loyalist writing such as Jonathan 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.
Before 1800 the rigors of pioneering left little time for the writing or
the appreciation of literature. The only notable works were journals,
such as that of Jacob Bailey, and the recorded travels of explorers,
such as Henry Kelsey, Samuel Hearne, and Sir Alexander
Mackenzie.
Literature in 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.
English Canadian Poetry in the 19th century



Clearing the Land
Stanley, NB, circa 1850s, by W.P. Kay (courtesy Library and Archives
Canada/C-000017)
In the early 19th century, most
Canadian poetry imitated earlier
British poetic works. 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.
English Canadian Poetry in the 19th century

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 through the
conventions of British poetry.
Charles Sangster
THE ST. LAWRENCE AND THE SAGUENAY
Charles Sangster
I.
There is but one to whom my hopes
are clinging
As clings the bee unto the morning
flower,
There is but one to whom my
thoughts are winging
Their dove-like passage through
each silent hour:
One who has made my heart her
summer bower.
Feeling and passion there forever
bloom
For her, who, by her love's
mysterious power,
Dispels the languor of my spirit's
gloom,
And lifts my dead heart up, like
Lazarus from the tomb.
The St. Lawrence river is an essential part of the topography of Quebec, and the area around it provides a diverse habitat for a wide variety
of marine and terrestrial life. The Saguenay - St. Lawrence Marine park is one such example. In the park, a complicated and interesting
ecosystem is formed by the Seguenay Fjord, where cold water churns the St. Lawrence waters to create densely populated aquatic zones.
Robert Service


Robert William Service (1874 –1958)
was a poet born into a Scottish family.
He moved to Canada at the age of 21.
Hired by the Canadian Bank of
Commerce, he was posted to the bank's
branch in Whitehorse in the Yukon
Territory. Inspired by the vast beauty of
the Yukon wilderness, Service started
writing his poetry about the things he
saw.
While much of his writing was published
in the early 20th century, its style and
themes belonged to that of the 19th
century. 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.
Robert Sevice – “The Cremation of Sam McGee”
(excerpt)
There are strange things done in the midnight sun
By the men who moil for gold;
The Arctic trails have their secret tales
That would make your blood run cold;
The Northern Lights have seen queer sights,
But the queerest they ever did see
Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge
I cremated Sam McGee.

Now Sam McGee was from Tennessee,
where the cotton blooms and blows.
Why he left his home in the South to roam
‘round the Pole, God only knows.
He was always cold, but the land of gold
seemed to hold him like a spell;
Though he’d often say in his homely way
that “he’d sooner live in hell.”
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.
Scott has been regarded as the most
experimental stylist of the Confederation
poets. 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.”
The Confederation poets were strongly
influenced by the British Romantics, mainly
Wordsworth and Shelley.
Duncan Campbell Scott (1862-1947)
Fiction in the 19th century

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.
Fiction in the 19th century: Humour

Image of Sam Slick
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. 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.
Fiction in the 19th century: Romance


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 conflicts.
Fiction in the 19th century: Romance and Melodrama

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.
Ernest Thompson Seton: Nature and Animals

Canadian writer and illustrator
Ernest Thompson Seton is
best known for his keen
observation of the natural
world. In Wild Animals I Have
Known (1898), Seton creates
short, often humorous
biographies of individual
creatures that he considers
exceptional. One biography
that appears in the book
recounts the adventures of
Silverspot, an unusually
intelligent crow. Silverspot
uses his gifts to his own
benefit, but he also shares
valuable lessons with younger
crows.
Ernest Thompson Seton: illustrations
Personal Narratives

Catharine
Parr Traill:
Pioneer
Canadian
Mother
(1802 –
1899)

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.
Both Catharine Parr Traill and her
sister Susanna Moodie wrote about
their experiences as English
immigrants in rural Canada in the
1830s. Traill’s book, The Backwoods
of Canada (1836), written as a series
of letters, details the customs and the
natural history of her new country.
Susanna Moodie (1803 – 1885)

Susanna Moodie emigrated from
England to Canada in 1832 with
her husband, John Moodie, and
their infant daughter. Like many
other settlers, Moodie was
determined to recreate in her
adopted homeland the orderly,
civilized life she and her family
had enjoyed in England. Pioneer
living proved to be more raw and
demanding than Moodie had
imagined, however. In Roughing It
in the Bush, first published in
England in 1852, Moodie included
sketches abounding in anecdotal
descriptions of fire, planting,
death, climate, neighbours, and
local customs.
Antiromantic Reactions


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 deathloving, 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.
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.
Immigration Office An Ontario Government Immigration Office, most
probably in Toronto, and before the First World War.

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.
Immigrant Children Immigrant children at York
Public School, Toronto, Ontario, 1923, with 14
nationalities represented in the group.
Humour and Social Criticism



Stephen Butler Leacock, (1869
–1944) was a Canadian writer
and economist. As a writer he is
famous for humorously
debunking the conventions used
by other writers.
In Nonsense Novels (1911), for
example, Leacock parodied 19thcentury 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.



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.
It is believed that Orillia, Ontario,
inspired the conception of
Mariposa (the little town).
"Mariposa is not a real town. On
the contrary, it is about seventy or
eighty of them. You may find them
all the way from Lake Superior to
the sea, with the same square
streets and the same maple trees
and the same churches and
hotels." (from Leacock’s
introduction)
His sources were mainly Alphonse
Daudet, Charles Dickens and
Mark Twain.
Stephen Leacock House in Orillia, Ontario
Social Criticism

William Robertson Davies, (1913 1995), Canadian novelist,
playwright, critic, journalist, and
professor
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 problems,
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.
Fiction: War and National Identity



On Dec. 6, 1917, a collision in Halifax Harbour
led to the biggest man-made explosion in the
world before the era of the atomic bomb. The
blast levelled most of the city and sent shards of
glass and burning debris flying for miles.
Much of the literature that emerged after World
War I attempted to capture the war’s horrors and
their effects on those who survived.
Douglas Durkin’s work The Magpie (1923)
documents the social isolation and confusion of
Craig Forrester, a young veteran who returns to his
hometown but finds that everything has changed.
Craig’s mind flashes between present life and the
battlefield, and he feels uneasy even in the
mundane events of everyday life.
World War I (1914-1918) and World War II (19391945) 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.
“Jalna” – A Pro-British Empire Saga

Mazo de la Roche
(1879 - 1961)
Mazo de la Roche’s popular
novel, Jalna (1927), was followed
by a series depicting the history,
through 150 years, of the
vigorous Whiteoak family who
lived at "Jalna". The series
includes 16 novels; among them
are Whiteoaks (1929), Finch's
Fortune (1931), Young Renny
(1935), Whiteoak Harvest (1936),
Growth of a Man (1938), The
Building of Jalna (1944), and
Mary Wakefield (1949). Her
dramatization of Whiteoaks was
staged in London and New York.
De la Roche also wrote plays,
children's books, a history of
Quebec, and an autobiography,
Ringing the Changes (1957).
Preoccupation with Europe


Who was FPG?
Frederick Philip Grove
(1879-1948)
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 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.
Morley Callaghan (1903-1990)

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.
"Death is mysterious,
but you can make out
of life whatever you
want to make. This is
your truth."

A contemporary and friend of
American writer Ernest
Hemingway, 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.
Modernist Poetry




Donald Flather – Black Tusk, Garibaldi Region
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 Group of Seven, young artists, mainly
from Toronto, 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 various
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.
Modernist Poetry



Edwin John Dove Pratt, (1882 –1964), who
published as E. J. Pratt, Canadian poet from
Newfoundland
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
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 nationbuilding.
Poetry in the Late 20th century



Leonard Cohen concert, May 2006, Toronto
With the increase in literary and arts-related
reviews in the 1940s and 1950s, new
figures and poetic movements emerged
that would dominate English 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.
Preeminent among other poets were
Raymond Souster, Irving Layton, P. K.
Page, Miriam Waddington, Milton Acorn,
Margaret Atwood, Margaret Avison,
Leonard Cohen, Robert Kroetsch.
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, Susan Musgrave.
Uniquely Canadian Forms



The Viator poem form was invented by
Canadian author and poet, Robin Skelton
(1925 – 1997). It consists of any stanzaic
form in which the first line of the first stanza
is the second line of the second stanza and
so on until the poem ends with that with
which it began. The term, Viator comes from
the Latin for traveller.
Shallot Confiture
It's care in cooking slow and carefully
that turns a shallot glistening golden
brown;
in salted water first you must weigh down
the scalded bulbs to meet this recipe.

Boil vinegar and sugary spices;
it's care in cooking slow and carefully
the syruped shallots, gradually,
then overnight, you'll rest the shallot
slices.

Then two days more, you'll slow repeat
your patient simmering, calmly, gently;
it's care in cooking slow and carefully
that yields your shallots clear and sweet.

By fourth day, time to lift them free,
to pack them in that savoury sauce,
preserve that silky, golden gloss;
it's care in cooking slow and carefully!
Fiction: The Search for Identity

Tim Hortons is a fast food restaurant chain founded in
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada with locations in Canada
and the United States. It is the largest coffee and
doughnut chain in Canada. In addition to its coffee and
doughnuts, Tim Hortons is also well-known for its
Timbits, bagels, soups, and sandwiches. Some
Canadians consider Tim Hortons an icon of Canadian
culture.
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 marked by 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 droughtridden Great Depression of the
1930s.
Fiction: The Search for Identity

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.
Landscape view of the famous Prince of Wales Hotel in
Waterton National Park Alberta, Canada
Who Has Seen the Wind?
Who Has Seen the Wind?
Christina Rossetti


Who has seen the wind?
Neither I nor you:
But when the leaves hang trembling
The wind is passing thro'.
Who has seen the wind?
Neither you nor I:
But when the trees bow down their heads
The wind is passing by.
W.O.Mitchell’s Who Has Seen the Wind

Although a limited world, the town of
Arcola represents Brian's initiation to
a greater and more mature
understanding of life, death, and
spirituality.
For Brian, the wind is the essence of
God.
Vincent Van Gogh – Starry Night, 1889
“Have you seen the wind?
To see the wind, you must look at what it
touches.
From a looming mountain range to a field of
corn, the wind touches everything and
everyone.”
The Search for Identity



Also writing at the time, but not
substantially recognized until later,
were Henry Kreisel, Malcolm
Lowry, Robertson Davies, Ethel
Wilson, and Mavis Gallant.
Except from Robertson Davies
and Mavis Gallant, the others
were immigrants coming from
different places in the world
(Austria, Britain, South-Africa).


There is no nonsense so gross
that society will not, at some time,
make a doctrine of it and defend it
with every weapon of communal
stupidity.
A truly great book should be read
in youth, again in maturity and
once more in old age, as a fine
building should be seen by
morning light, at noon and by
moonlight.
The love of truth lies at the root of
much humor.
Robertson Davies – Random
Quotes
Technical Experimentation


Sheila Watson (1909 – 1998), best
know for her modernist novel, The
Double Hook
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.
Mordecai Richler (1931 – 2001)

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.
A Clear Narrative Line

Less obviously
experimental writers
who were willing to
maintain a clear
narrative line included
Alice Munro, Margaret
Atwood, and Margaret
Laurence.
Margaret Laurence (1926 – 1987)

Margaret Laurence was born Jean
Margaret Wemyss in Neepawa, Manitoba
on July 18, 1926. She graduated from
Manitoba’s United College in 1947 and
married Jack Laurence. In 1949, the
Laurences moved to England, followed in
1950 by a move to British Somaliland. In
1952, they moved to Ghana where
Margaret wrote her first novel, This Side
Jordan. In 1962, Margaret left Jack and
moved to England. Between 1964 and
1974, she published five novels set in the
fictional Manitoba town of Manawaka.
The first, The Stone Angel, tells the story
of Hagar Shipley, an elderly and deeply
unpleasant woman who wrestles with her
failing physical condition and troubling
memories of the past. Laurence was
made a Companion of the Order of
Canada in 1971. On Jan. 5, 1987,
terminally ill with lung cancer, Laurence
took her own life.
Margaret Laurence: The Stone Angel
The Stone Angel introduces Hagar
Shipley, one of the most memorable
characters in Canadian fiction. Stubborn,
querulous, self-reliant – and, at ninety, with
her life nearly behind her – Hagar Shipley
makes a bold last step towards freedom and
independence.
As her story unfolds, we are drawn
into her past. We meet Hagar as a young
girl growing up in a bleak prairie town; as
the wife of an unsuccessful farmer with
whom her marriage was stormy; as a
mother who dominates her younger son;
and, finally, as an old woman isolated by an
uncompromising pride and by the stern
virtues she has inherited from her pioneer
ancestors.
Vivid, evocative, moving, The Stone
Angel celebrates the triumph of the spirit,
and reveals Margaret Laurence at the height
of her powers as a writer of extraordinary
craft and profound insight into the workings
of the human heart.
Margaret Atwood (1939 - )


Margaret Eleanor Atwood was born in Ottawa
on Nov. 18, 1939. She studied English (with
Northrop Frye) and philosophy at the University
of Toronto, which she attended from 1957 to
1961. She then did graduate studies at Harvard.
Her reputation as a poet was established when
The Circle Game (1966) won the Governor
General’s Award. She served as an editor of
House of Anansi Press from 1971 to 1973, and
worked as an editor and political cartoonist for
This Magazine. In 1980 Atwood became vicechair of the Writers’ Union of Canada. She also
served as president of PEN International's
Anglo-Canadian branch from 1984 to 1986.
Her novels include Surfacing (1972), Life Before
Man (1979) and The Robber Bride (1993).
Atwood’s 1985 novel The Handmaid's Tale, a
science-fiction fable set in a world where
reproduction is controlled by the government,
brought her international success and critical
acclaim. One of her most recent novels, The
Blind Assassin, won the Booker Prize in 2000.
Margaret Atwood’s Dystopic Vision of the Future:
“The Handmaid’s Tale”

The Handmaid's Tale

In this multi-award-winning, bestselling
novel, Margaret Atwood has created a
stunning Orwellian vision of the near
future. This is the story of Offred, one of
the unfortunate “Handmaids” under the
new social order who have only one
purpose: to breed. In Gilead, where
women are prohibited from holding jobs,
reading, and forming friendships, Offred’s
persistent memories of life in the “time
before” and her will to survive are acts of
rebellion. Provocative, startling, prophetic,
and with Margaret Atwood’s devastating
irony, wit, and acute perceptive powers in
full force, The Handmaid’s Tale is at once
a mordant satire and a dire warning.
Alice Munro (1931 - )

Alice Munro was born in the small rural town
of Wingham, Ontario. She began writing as
a teenager and published her first story,
"The Dimensions of a Shadow," while a
student at the University of Western Ontario
in 1950. Her first collection of stories, Dance
of the Happy Shades (1968), was highly
acclaimed and won that year’s Governor
General's Award, Canada’s highest literary
prize. This success was followed by Lives of
Girls and Women (1971), a collection of
interlinked stories that was published as a
novel. In 1978, Munro's Who Do You Think
You Are? was published (titled The Beggar
Maid: Stories of Flor and Rose in the United
States); this book led Munro to win the
Governor General’s Literary Award for a
second time. Her stories frequently appear
in publications such as The New Yorker, The
Atlantic Monthly, Grand Street,
Mademoiselle, and The Paris Review.
Southern Ontario Gothic


Southern Ontario Gothic is a
sub-genre of the Gothic novel
genre and a feature of
Canadian literature that comes
from Southern Ontario. The
term was first used in Graeme
Gibson's Eleven Canadian
Novelists to recognize a preexisting tendency to apply
aspects of the Gothic novel to
writing based in and around
Southern Ontario.
Notable writers of this subgenre include Alice Munro,
Margaret Atwood, Robertson
Davies, Jane Urquhart, Marian
Engel, James Reaney and
Barbara Gowdy.
Margaret Atwood and Graeme Gibson



Like the Southern Gothic of
American writers such as
William Faulkner, Flannery
O'Connor and Eudora
Welty, Southern Ontario
Gothic analyzes and
critiques social conditions
such as race, gender,
religion and politics, but in
a Southern Ontario context.
Southern Ontario Gothic is
generally characterized by
a stern realism set against
the dour small-town
Protestant morality
stereotypical of the region,
and often has underlying
themes of moral hypocrisy.
Actions and people that act
against humanity, logic,
and morality all are
portrayed unfavourably,
and one or more
characters may be
suffering from some form of
mental illness.


The Gothic novel has
traditionally examined the
role of evil in the human
soul, and has incorporated
dark or horrific imagery to
create the desired setting.
Some (but not all) writers
of Southern Ontario Gothic
use supernatural or magic
realist elements; a few
deviate from realism
entirely, in the manner of
the fantastical gothic novel.
Virtually all dwell to a
certain extent upon the
grotesque.
Notable works of the genre
include Davies' Fifth
Business, Findley's
Headhunter, Atwood's
Alias Grace and The
Robber Bride, and Munro's
Selected Stories.
Auchmar
Mansion, 1854
Hamilton, Ont.
Dundurn
Castle, 1835
Hamilton,
Ont.
Multiculturalism


Born in a Mennonite family in
Saskatchewan, Rudy Wiebe has
been professor emeritus,
Department of English at the
University of Alberta since 1992.
The multiculturalism of late20th-century Canada is
evident in the contributions by
writers of many different
backgrounds.
Joy Kogawa, Bharati
Mukherjee, Rudy Wiebe,
Dionne Brand, Basil Johnston,
Lee Maracle, Alootook Ipellie,
Ian Ross, and Lenore KeeshigTobias present strong
perspectives on indigenous
communities, language and
identity, and cultural autonomy.
Late 20th century Developments


Jack Hodgins (1938 - )
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.
Timothy Findley (1930 – 2002)




Findley’s novel The Wars (1977) takes the
reader through the experience of World War I,
symbolically recording not a new future but the
death of possibility.
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 focuses on themes such
as the power of memory, the decay of the
family, and the loss of sanity.
Michael Ondaatje (1943 - )



Born in Sri Lanka (formerly Ceylon) of
Dutch-Tamil-Sinhalese-Portuguese
origin, in 1954 he moved to England.
After relocating to Canada in 1962,
Ondaatje became a Canadian citizen.
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.
The “Younger” Generation



Douglas Coupland, Born:
December 30, 1961
Baden-Söllingen, Germany
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 (1995),
describe a world in which unlikely
protagonists struggle against crazed
technocrats and insidious computer
networks, articulating deep-rooted
anxieties over autonomy and power.
Cyberpunk


William Ford Gibson (born
March 17, 1948, Conway, South
Carolina) is an American-born
science fiction author resident in
Canada since 1968. He has been
called the father of the cyberpunk
subgenre of science fiction. He is
credited with coining the term
"cyberspace". His first novel,
Neuromancer, has sold more than
6.5 million copies worldwide since
its publication in 1984.
The dystopic intermingling of
technology and humanity is the
main feature of his works.
And there are more to be added…
later!

"Cyberspace. A consensual
hallucination experienced daily by
billions of legitimate operators, in
every nation, by children being
taught mathematical concepts...A
graphical representation of data
abstracted from the banks of
every computer in the human
system. Unthinkable complexity.
Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and
constellations of data. Like city
lights, receding..."
William Gibson, Neuromancer
Blade Runner
the Ridley Scott film that gave
cyberpunk SF its visual
representation