A history and culture chapter provides historical and cultural context for the study of Canadian literature.
| Canada Reads | |
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Written by CanLit Guides' Editorial Team
Canada Reads is a CBC Radio program that was launched in English in 2002 and in 2004 in French as Le Combat des livres. Over the course of a week in five one-hour segments, five celebrity judges champion a book and engage in debate about which one Canadians should read. Each day a book is voted off the list until only one is left standing. The format of the program is often compared to reality TV shows such as Survivor. The show playfully foregrounds conflict in its branding, using taglines such as “battle of the books” or “literary title fight” (CBC). That said, the champion book carries a lot of cultural cachet and the show has had enormous impact on the development of a popular Canadian reading public.
| Canadian Literature and the Canada-US Border | |
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Written by Gillian Roberts
This chapter introduces Canadian literature’s relationship to the field of Canada-US Border Studies. In what we might call Canadian “border texts,” the border features prominently, if variably. The Canadian nation is a contested space, a site of struggle over political and cultural values between groups with diverging interests. Canadian border texts reveal the border as a site of struggle, too, figuring differently from different people’s perspectives. In analyzing these literary texts, we see that at times—for some people—the border appears porous and permeable, and at other times—for other people—impenetrable.
| Comics and Canadian Literature | |
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Written by Brenna Clarke Gray
Some of the most significant names in Canadian literature—people like author Margaret Atwood and poet bpNichol—have throughout their careers played with comics as part of their larger body of work. Literary scholars have often paid attention when “serious” writers engage in comics, such as Carl Peters in his collection bpNichol Comics, or Reingard M. Nischik’s attention to Atwood’s comics in her Engendering Genre. But how do we analyze comics produced in Canada by comics creators? We now see comics appearing more frequently in college and university courses, including in Canadian literature classes. Yet the history, scholarship, and language of literary study do not always neatly transpose onto the world of comics. This chapter is designed to introduce new comics readers to the history of creating and evaluating comics in Canada and to the practice of reading them as scholars.
| Diaspora Studies and Canadian Literature | |
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Written by L. Camille van der Marel
When traced to its Greek roots, the term “diaspora” means to scatter about, to disperse. Imagine dandelion seeds on the wind: this image is often used to introduce students to the concept of diaspora. Indeed, dandelion seeds are a common symbol for departments, journals (including Canadian Literature), book series, and conferences that specialize in or incorporate diaspora studies. Analyzing the image of dandelion seeds on the wind is a good way to begin thinking about the complexities and nuances that inform readings of diasporic literature.
| Feminist History of Literature and Culture in Canada | |
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Written by CanLit Guides' Editorial Team
Feminist literary scholars analyze and consider the representation of gender in literary and cultural works while considering the societal implications of these representations. However, scholars do not come up with theories of gender representation in a vacuum. The work of feminist activists in the community, media, and political arena influence the academic work of feminist scholars—and vice versa.
| Indigenous and Diasporic Intersections in Canadian Literature | |
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Written by L. Camille van der Marel
Indigenous and diasporic texts are often taught in the same Canadian literature classes and have shared concerns with race, displacement, identity, and community. That said, literary scholars rarely place these literatures in dialogue with one another. This chapter offers guidance for those trying to see, discuss, and research the connections between these two bodies of literature.
| Indigenous Literary History (1960s-1990) | |
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Written by CanLit Guides' Editorial Team
Several important political developments in the 1960s helped strengthen Indigenous nationalism in Canada. Until the 1960s, Status Indians—peoples legally recognized by the Indian Act—lacked many rights enjoyed by Canadian citizens, as the Indian Act categorized them as wards of the state.
| Introduction to Nationalism | |
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Written by CanLit Guides' Editorial Team
A nation is a group of people who regard themselves as sharing the same culture; a state is a group of people governed by the same laws and political institutions. Groups of people connected through history settled within a geographical region, building customs and forming dialects. Modern nations emerged from the desire of such groups to claim and defend land for hunting, gathering, agriculture, and other economic activities. The borders on contemporary maps resulted from long histories of negotiations and wars among nations and nation-states to control particular territories.
| Literary Censorship and Controversy in Canada | |
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Written by Lucia Lorenzi
This chapter introduces you to literary censorship in Canada, looking both at positions taken by Canadian scholars on the practice of censorship and its effects, as well as at specific examples. We will analyze controversies around three texts to better see how the censorship of Canadian literature works in practice: Timothy Findley’s The Wars (1977) and Beatrice Culleton Mosionier’s In Search of April Raintree (1983) provide examples of censorship where the authors themselves were involved in contesting or responding directly to critics in their texts; Raziel Reid’s When Everything Feels Like the Movies (2014) provides an example of a contemporary attempt to strip a novel of its literary award on the basis of its allegedly controversial content.
| Narratives of Empire: Hearne and Mackenzie | |
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Written by CanLit Guides' Editorial Team
The stereotype of the explorer is a single European man, often pictured standing at the bow of a ship looking off to the horizon, or planting a flag on some new territory to claim it for the empire.
| Nationalism and Literature: Cross-Genre Connections | |
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Written by CanLit Guides' Editorial Team
In this critical writing assignment, compare and contrast one book and at least one (or even a few) of the following poems (or select from others found in this unit).
| Nationalism, 1500–1700s: Exploration and Settlement | |
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Written by CanLit Guides' Editorial Team
The development of cultures and nation states is characterized by migration (see Diamond and Wolf). With the advent of new technologies to connect people all over the world, such as airplanes and the Internet, this slow migration accelerated in the twentieth century, and continues to gather speed. This phenomena, also known as globalization, reflects the shift toward the colonial expansion of empires, starting in Canadian history with English and French colonization and continuing as well as in more contemporary forms of international immigration and trade.
| Nationalism, 1800s: Loyalism and Nation-building | |
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Written by CanLit Guides' Editorial Team
Loyalism, still strongly colonial rather than national at this time, helped develop a problematic and still pervasive collective concept of Canada as a white, Christian, primarily Anglophone, civil society.
| Nationalism, 1950s–1970s: Cultural Nationalism, the Massey Commission, and Thematic Criticism | |
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Written by CanLit Guides' Editorial Team
A form of nationalism particularly relevant to the study of Canadian literature is cultural nationalism, which argues for the support, recognition, and preservation of cultural institutions and products as necessary elements of national identity. This nationalism has sometimes been driven by a desire for self-articulation and sometimes by cultural protectionism.
| Nationalism, 1960s onwards: Multiculturalism | |
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Written by CanLit Guides' Editorial Team
In the 1960s and 70s, the unified vision of a culturally homogeneous nation run by elite white men was fractured by civil rights movements against racial discrimination, the women’s movement, and the Quiet Revolution in Quebec. The Quiet Revolution, which became noisier over time, led to the referendums on sovereignty in 1980 and 1995 because of the division between federalist and sovereignist political factions.
| Nationalism, 1980s onwards: Contesting Multiculturalism | |
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Written by CanLit Guides' Editorial Team
Multiculturalism itself is not a settled concept—even though it is legislated in Canada—and it continues to be developed or contested in various ways.
| Nationalism, late 1800s–1950s: Canadian Immigration and War | |
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Written by CanLit Guides' Editorial Team
In the nineteenth century, Canada created assimilationist legislation for the governance of Aboriginal peoples (see especially the Indian Act of 1876), producing the residential school system among other initiatives that sought to eradicate cultural differences.
| Official Multiculturalism’s Funding of Canadian Literature: The Writing and Publications Program | |
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Written by Brendan McCormack
In this chapter, we will explore how “official multiculturalism”—that is, multiculturalism as a federal government policy in Canada—has influenced the writing and publishing of Canadian literature. While you have likely already thought about multiculturalism as part of the social context within which Canadian literature circulates, or about which Canadian authors write, official multiculturalism has also supported the production of Canadian literature itself. This chapter will introduce you to the history of the Writing and Publications Program (WPP), through which Canada’s federal multiculturalism directorate provided funding for literature from the 1970s-1990s.
| Orature and Literature | |
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Written by CanLit Guides' Editorial Team
Many early anthropologists argued that all societies transition from hunter-gatherer, to nomadic herding, to agriculture, to the formation of large cities in the same way, and that the later stages were superior to the earlier ones. Anthropology has moved on from this idea; however, the idea that certain societies are superior to others is connected with other widespread ideas such as the myth of progress (new technologies are invariably better), Whig history (past societies are evolving towards democratic freedom), Social Darwinism (the fittest humans survive best, so the poor should be left to starve), and Scientific Racism (whites or Caucasians are at the top of an evolutionary ladder).
| Shifting Representation: Ronnie the Bren Gun Girl | |
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Written by CanLit Guides' Editorial Team
Despite the hyper-masculinity of early to mid-twentieth century modernism, representations of gendered spaces and relationships began to shift with the World Wars, which produced the need for women to play a greater role in public life. Much of this shift was influenced by the need for women to work in factories, filling the positions traditionally held by the men now risking their lives at the front.
| The Periodical Press: Newspapers, Magazines, and Literary Culture in Early Canada | |
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Written by Ceilidh Hart
The book tends to get a great deal of focus in contemporary Canadian literary culture: literary awards, national reading programs such as Canada Reads, university courses, even, tend to place the book at the centre. And yet, in the nineteenth century, it was the periodical press—magazines and newspapers—that drove Canada’s cultural life. This chapter, using the writing career of Isabella Valancy Crawford as a case study, explores the importance to readers and writers alike of periodical publishing in early Canada, and the profound role it played in shaping a national literary culture at that time.
| What is “Restaurant Literature”? Depictions of Chinese Restaurants in Canadian Literature | |
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Written by Nathalie Cooke and Shelley Boyd
This chapter identifies a growing body of Canadian literary works depicting Chinese restaurants as sites and sources of narrative, and seeks to answer a series of questions. What are the characteristics of the genre of restaurant literature? What are the key texts—those responsible for shaping, reshaping, and innovating this genre? What historical contexts have influenced this genre’s development? This chapter looks closely at a representative selection of restaurant literature in order to explore ways in which authors have written Chinese restaurants into the literary landscape, and to understand storytelling’s ability to introduce readers to new characters, cultures, and perspectives over time.
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