Canadian literature

Canadian literature (widely abbreviated as CanLit[1]) is literature originating from Canada. Canadian writers have produced a variety of genres. Influences on Canadian writers are broad, both geographically and historically.

Before European contact and the Confederation of Canada, Indigenous people in North America have occupied the land and have maintained a rich and diverse history of culture, identity, language, art and literature. "Indigenous literature" is a problematic term, as every cultural group has its own distinct oral tradition, language, and cultural practices. Therefore, Indigenous literatures in Canada is a more inclusive term for understanding the variety of languages and traditions across communities.

After the colonization of Canada, the dominant European cultures were originally English, French, and Gaelic. After Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau's "Announcement of Implementation of Policy of Multiculturalism within Bilingual Framework," in 1971, Canadian critics and academics gradually began to recognize that there existed a more diverse population of readers and writers. The country's literature has been strongly influenced by international immigration, particularly in recent decades. Since the 1980s Canada's ethnic and cultural diversity have been openly reflected in its literature, with many of its most prominent writers focusing on ethnic minority identity, duality and cultural differences. However, Canadians have been less willing to acknowledge the diverse languages of Canada, besides English and French.[2][3]

Categories

French-Canadian literature

In 1802, the Lower Canada legislative library was founded, being one of the first in Occident, the first in the Canadas. For comparison, the library of the British House of Commons was founded sixteen years later. The library had some rare titles about geography, natural science and letters. All books it contained were moved to the Canadian parliament in Montreal when the two Canadas, lower and upper, were united. On April 25, 1849, a dramatic event occurred: the Canadian parliament was burned by furious people along with thousands of French Canadian books and a few hundred of English books. This is why some people still affirm today, falsely, that from the early settlements until the 1820s, Quebec had virtually no literature. Though historians, journalists, and learned priests published, overall the total output that remain from this period and that had been kept out of the burned parliament is small.

It was the rise of Quebec patriotism and the 1837 Lower Canada Rebellion, in addition to a modern system of primary school education, which led to the rise of French-Canadian fiction. L'influence d'un livre by Philippe-Ignace-Francois Aubert de Gaspé is widely regarded as the first French-Canadian novel. The genres which first became popular were the rural novel and the historical novel. French authors were influential, especially authors like Balzac.

Gabrielle Roy was a notable French Canadian author.

In 1866, Father Henri-Raymond Casgrain became one of Quebec's first literary theorists. He argued that literature's goal should be to project an image of proper Catholic morality. However, a few authors like Louis-Honoré Fréchette and Arthur Buies broke the conventions to write more interesting works.

This pattern continued until the 1930s with a new group of authors educated at the Université Laval and the Université de Montréal. Novels with psychological and sociological foundations became the norm. Gabrielle Roy and Anne Hébert even began to earn international acclaim, which had not happened to French-Canadian literature before. During this period, Quebec theatre, which had previously been melodramas and comedies, became far more involved.

French-Canadian literature began to greatly expand with the turmoil of the Second World War, the beginnings of industrialization in the 1950s, and most especially the Quiet Revolution in the 1960s. French-Canadian literature also began to attract a great deal of attention globally, with Acadian novelist Antonine Maillet winning the Prix Goncourt. An experimental branch of Québécois literature also developed; for instance the poet Nicole Brossard wrote in a formalist style. In 1979, Roch Carrier wrote the story The Hockey Sweater, which highlighted the cultural and social tensions between English and French speaking Canada.

Before Confederation

Sisters Susanna Moodie and Catherine Parr Traill wrote several stories about their experiences in the Canadas.

Because Canada only officially became a country on July 1, 1867, it has been argued that literature written before this time was colonial. For example, Susanna Moodie and Catharine Parr Traill, English sisters who adopted the country as their own, moved to Upper Canada in 1832. They recorded their experiences as pioneers in Parr Traill's The Backwoods of Canada (1836) and Canadian Crusoes (1852), and Moodie's Roughing It in the Bush (1852) and Life in the Clearings (1853). However, both women wrote until their deaths, placing them in the country for more than 50 years and certainly well past Confederation. Moreover, their books often dealt with survival and the rugged Canadian environment; these themes re-appear in other Canadian works, including Margaret Atwood's Survival. Moodie and Parr Traill's sister, Agnes Strickland, remained in England and wrote elegant royal biographies, creating a stark contrast between Canadian and English literatures.

However, one of the earliest "Canadian" writers virtually always included in Canadian literary anthologies is Thomas Chandler Haliburton (1796–1865), who died just two years before Canada's official birth. He is remembered for his comic character, Sam Slick, who appeared in The Clockmaker and other humorous works throughout Haliburton's life.

After 1867

Charles G. D. Roberts was a poet that belonged to an informal group known as the Confederation Poets.

A group of poets now known as the "Confederation Poets", including Charles G. D. Roberts, Archibald Lampman, Bliss Carman, Duncan Campbell Scott, and William Wilfred Campbell, came to prominence in the 1880s and 1890s, Choosing the world of nature as their inspiration, their work was drawn from their own experiences and, at its best, written in their own tones. Isabella Valancy Crawford, Frederick George Scott, and Francis Sherman are also sometimes associated with this group.

During this period, E. Pauline Johnson and William Henry Drummond were writing popular poetry - Johnson's based on her part-Mohawk heritage, and Drummond, the Poet of the Habitant, writing dialect verse.

Reacting against a tradition that emphasised the wilderness, poet Leonard Cohen's novel Beautiful Losers (1966), was labelled by one reviewer "the most revolting book ever written in Canada".[4] However, Cohen is perhaps best known as a folk singer and songwriter, with an international following.

Canadian author Farley Mowat is best known for his work Never Cry Wolf (1963) and his Governor General's Award-winning children's book, Lost in the Barrens (1956).

Following World War II, writers such as Mavis Gallant, Mordecai Richler, Norman Levine, Margaret Laurence and Irving Layton added to the Modernist influence to Canadian literature previously introduced by F. R. Scott, A. J. M. Smith and others associated with the McGill Fortnightly. This influence, at first, was not broadly appreciated. Norman Levine's Canada Made Me,[5] a travelogue that presented a sour interpretation of the country in 1958, for example, was widely rejected.

After 1967, the country's centennial year, the national government increased funding to publishers and numerous small presses began operating throughout the country.[6] The best-known Canadian children's writers include L. M. Montgomery and Monica Hughes.

Contemporary Canadian literature: After 1967

Arguably, the best-known living Canadian writer internationally (especially since the deaths of Robertson Davies and Mordecai Richler) is Margaret Atwood, a prolific novelist, poet, and literary critic. Some great 20th-century Canadian authors include Margaret Laurence, and Gabrielle Roy.

Alice Munro is a Canadian short story writer who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013.

This group, along with Nobel Laureate Alice Munro, who has been called the best living writer of short stories in English,[7] were the first to elevate Canadian Literature to the world stage. During the post-war decades only a handful of books of any literary merit were published each year in Canada, and Canadian literature was viewed as an appendage to British and American writing. When academic Clara Thomas decided in the 1940s to concentrate on Canadian literature for her master's thesis, the idea was so novel and so radical that word of her decision reached The Globe and Mail books editor William Arthur Deacon, who then personally reached out to Thomas to pledge his and the newspaper's resources in support of her work.[8]

Other major Canadian novelists include Carol Shields, Lawrence Hill, and Alice Munro. Carol Shields novel The Stone Diaries won the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and another novel, Larry's Party, won the Orange Prize in 1998. Lawrence Hill's Book of Negroes won the 2008 Commonwealth Writers' Prize Overall Best Book Award, while Alice Munro became the first Canadian to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013.[9] Munro also received the Man Booker International Prize in 2009.

In the 1960s, a renewed sense of nation helped foster new voices in Canadian poetry, including: Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, Leonard Cohen, Eli Mandel and Margaret Avison. Others such as Al Purdy, Milton Acorn, and Earle Birney, already published, produced some of their best work during this period.

The TISH Poetry movement in Vancouver brought about poetic innovation from bpNichol, Jamie Reid, George Bowering, Fred Wah, Frank Davey, Daphne Marlatt, David Cull, and Lionel Kearns.

Contemporary poets in Canada include George Elliott Clarke, the former Canadian Parliamentary Poet Laureate.

More recently a younger generation of Canadian poets has been expanding the boundaries of originality: Brian Brett, Ken Babstock, Karen Solie, Lynn Crosbie, Patrick Lane, David McGimpsey, Stuart Ross, Sonnet L'Abbé, George Elliott Clarke and Barry Dempster have all imprinted their unique consciousnesses onto the map of Canadian imagery. Evie Christie's collection, Gutted, seems to evoke the 17th century metaphysical conceit, but in a modern, urban Canadian guise. A notable anthology of Canadian poetry is The New Oxford book of Canadian Verse, edited by Margaret Atwood ( ISBN 0-19-540450-5).

Anne Carson is probably the best known Canadian poet living today. Carson in 1996 won the Lannan Literary Award for poetry. The foundation's awards in 2006 for poetry, fiction and nonfiction each came with $US 150,000.

Canadian authors who have won international awards

Awards

There are a number of notable Canadian awards for literature:

Awards For Children's and Young Adult Literature:

Further reading

  • K. Balachandran, K. (2007) Canadian Literature: An Overview. Sarup & Sons
  • Eugene Benson and William Toye, eds. (1997) The Oxford companion to Canadian literature; online. 1226 pp of short articles by experts.
  • Faye Hammill (2007). Canadian literature. Edinburgh Univ. Press. ISBN 978-0-7486-2162-0
  • Jeffrey M. Heath (1991). Profiles in Canadian Literature, Volume 7. Dundurn Press. ISBN 1-55002-145-1
  • William H. New (1990). Native writers and Canadian writing. UBC Press. ISBN 0-7748-0370-3
  • William H. New (2002). Encyclopedia of literature in Canada. Univ. Toronto Press. ISBN 0-8020-0761-9
  • William H. New (2003). A history of Canadian literature. McGill-Queen's Univ. Press. ISBN 0-7735-2597-1
  • Michael Newton (2015) Seanchaidh na Coille / The Memory-Keeper of the Forest: Anthology of Scottish-Gaelic Literature of Canada.
  • Reingard M. Nischik (2008). History of literature in Canada: English-Canadian and French-Canadian. Camden House. ISBN 9781571133595
  • Pivato, Joseph (1994 and 2003). Echo: Essays on Other Literatures. Guernica Editions. ISBN 1-55071-176-8
  • David Stouck (1988). Major Canadian authors: a critical introduction to Canadian literature in English. Univ. Nebraska Press. ISBN 0-8032-4119-4
  • Cynthia Sugars and Eleanor Ty, eds. (2015). Canadian Literature and Cultural Memory. Oxford Univ. Press, 493pp. Scholarly essays on how cultural memory is reflected in Canadian fiction, poetry, drama, films, etc.
  • Elizabeth Waterston (1973). Survey; a short history of Canadian literature. Methuen. ISBN 0-458-90930-0

See also

References

  1. ↑ Coupland, Douglas. "What Is CanLit?" The New York Times, 22 August 2006.
  2. ↑ Newton, Michael (2015). Seanchaidh na Coille / The Memory-Keeper of the Forest. Cape Breton University Press. |access-date= requires |url= (help)
  3. ↑ Rankin, Effie. "A shared song lasts long". Comhairle na Gàidhlig. Gaelic Council of Nova Scotia. Retrieved 14 January 2017.
  4. ↑ Who held a gun to Leonard Cohen's head? Tim de Lisle, Guardian Online, retrieved 11 October 2006.
  5. ↑ "Norman Levine". Independent.co.uk. 20 June 2005. Retrieved 2017-08-20.
  6. ↑ "Archived copy". Archived from the original on 2009-03-04. Retrieved 2008-01-26.
  7. ↑ "For a long time Alice Munro has been compared with Chekhov; John Updike would add Tolstoy, and AS Byatt would say Guy de Maupassant and Flaubert. Munro is often called the best living writer of short stories in English; the words "short story" are frequently dropped." Riches of a Double Life, Ada Edemariam, Guardian Online, retrieved 11 October 2006.
  8. ↑ "Author and educator Clara Thomas was a relentless advocate of CanLit". The Globe and Mail, November 28, 2013.
  9. 1 2 "Nobel-winner Alice Munro hailed as 'master' of short stories". Cbc.ca. Retrieved 2017-08-20.
  10. ↑ "Archived copy". Archived from the original on 2014-04-25. Retrieved 2014-04-24.
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