Canadian Fiction
Canadian fiction refers to literary works, including novels, short stories, and poetry, that are written by Canadian authors or set in Canada. It often explores themes related to Canadian identity, culture, and landscape. Canadian fiction has contributed significantly to the country's literary heritage and has produced many acclaimed authors, such as Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro, and Michael Ondaatje.
6 Key excerpts on "Canadian Fiction"
eBook - ePubPrivate and Fictional Words (Routledge Revivals)
Canadian Women Novelists of the 1970s and 1980s
- Coral Ann Howells(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Canada’s multicultural inheritance is written into many of these fictions with their mixture of genres as well – female gothic, sentimental romance, spy stories, animal stories, pastorals, science fiction – in the recognition that literary traditions have to be transformed in a process of perpetual revision. Only through story-telling can connections with the past be realized, for inheritance comes to possess reality only when it is re-imagined and when history and legend are so closely interwoven that no objective truth is possible. The problems faced by Canadians are similar to those faced by any colonial culture like Australia or New Zealand or, earlier, the United States which has been up against the difficulty of inheriting a mother tongue together with its traditions and without a powerful infusion of indigenous culture as in Africa, India or the Caribbean – except that for Canadians the problems are further complicated by having two mother cultures and two national languages, English and French. How to find a distinctive voice for such a mixed society or to have that voice listened to abroad has always been a crucial difficulty. With Canada it seems to be resolving itself in division, as English-Canadian Fiction becomes more widely known in the English-speaking Commonwealth and French-Canadian within the Francophone tradition. D. H. Lawrence focused the dilemma for American fiction when he wrote in 1923: It is hard to hear a new voice, as hard as it is to listen to an unknown language. We just don’t listen. There is a new voice in the old American classics. The world has declined to hear it, or has babbled about children’s stories. 12 Though the invisibility of American literature has now become past history, Canadian literature is currently confronting the same problems of being heard as a ‘new voice’ while maintaining its ‘difference’, with all the instability that this word implies...
eBook - ePubThe Bush Garden
Essays on the Canadian Imagination
- Northrop Frye(Author)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- A List(Publisher)
...Tourist-writing has its own importance (e.g., Maria Chapdelaine), as has the use of Canadian history for purposes of romance, of which more later. But it would be an obvious fallacy to claim that the setting provided anything more than novelty. When Canadian writers are urged to use distinctively Canadian themes, the fallacy is less obvious, but still there. The forms of literature are autonomous: they exist within literature itself, and cannot be derived from any experience outside literature. What the Canadian writer finds in his experience and environment may be new, but it will be new only as content: the form of his expression of it can take shape only from what he has read, not from what he has experienced. The great technical experiments of Joyce and Proust in fiction, of Eliot and Hopkins in poetry, have resulted partly from profound literary scholarship, from seeing the formal possibilities inherent in the literature they have studied. A writer who is or who feels removed from his literary tradition tends rather to take over forms already in existence. We notice how often critics of Canadian Fiction have occasion to remark that a novel contains a good deal of sincere feeling and accurate observation, but that it is spoiled by an unconvincing plot, usually one too violent or dependent on coincidence for such material. What has happened is that the author felt he could make a novel out of his knowledge and observation, but had no story in particular to tell. His material did not come to him in the form of a story, but as a consolidated chunk of experience, reflection, and sensibility. He had to invent a plot to put this material in causal shape (for writing, as Kafka says, is an art of causality), to pour the new wine of content into the old bottles of form...
eBook - ePubTransculturing Auto/Biography
Forms of Life Writing
- Rosalia Baena, Rosalia Baena(Authors)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...It is difficult to find the right balance between the intrinsic history of literature — one that focuses on literature and its internal changes and ages — and an extrinsic approach — the consideration of literary works as related to and influenced by social, cultural and political events (Patterson, 1990: 250). Either extreme has been favored at alternative times throughout the different phases of the development of the modern world, and controversy has usually followed a particular choice. Moreover, we can highlight a third factor that in the case of young countries like Canada plays a particularly relevant role: the concept of "nation." According to Jonathan Kertzer, the opposition between "aesthetic form and social function" is thus solved, because "national literature often incorporates history as setting or background" and, conversely, "historical understanding takes narrative forms that use the nation as their meta-subject or hero" (1998: 18). In this fashion, literature and history cease being diverse subjects with competing particularities and method of analysis, and adopt a common goal that makes them merge and share: each other's dynamics. By negotiating these three factors — literature, history and nation — literary histories and anthologies attempt to offer a coherent perspective on the development of the literary history of Canada. Nevertheless, there is jet another form which can help to achieve this end while adding its intrinsic potential. I argue that the Canadian literary biography, analyzed as an independent genre, may contribute a unique combination of historical background, individual experience, and literary criticism, and thus support the enactment of a literary history which searches for markers of Canadian identity...
eBook - ePubBeyond "Understanding Canada"
Transnational Perspectives on Canadian Literature
- Melissa Tanti, Jeremy Haynes, Daniel Coleman, Lorraine York, Melissa Tanti, Jeremy Haynes, Daniel Coleman, Lorraine York(Authors)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- The University of Alberta Press(Publisher)
...This is certainly borne out by the number of Canadian and Québécois authors and critics whose names appear in the table of contents: Margaret Atwood, Carol Shields, Marian Engel, Douglas Glover, Robert Lalonde, Myrna Kostash, Michael Ondaatje, Janice Kulyk Keefer, Émile Ollivier, Dionne Brand, and Smaro Kamboureli. The list is even longer one year later in TransCanadiana 2, where essays on transculturalism and on work by authors such as Quebec’s Sergio Kokis, Pan Bouyoucas, and Anne Hébert, and on work by English Canada’s Joy Kogawa, Ann-Marie MacDonald, and Yann Martel confirm the contributors’ knowledge of Canada’s multifaceted literature and its place in the study of the country. Fast forward to the end of the Understanding Canada period, 2012, and to the publication of two separate volumes by international Canadianists, each offering considerable Canadian literary and Canadian literary criticism content. In their introduction to Re-exploring Canadian Space / Redécouvrir l’espace canadien, Cornelius Remi and Jeanette den Toonder reflect on how research priorities changed under DFAIT’S Understanding Canada program. They propose that rather than a substitute for “traditional research themes, such as arts, literature, linguistics, history, sociology and geography” (xi), the changed focus adds “a new dimension to the study of Canada” (xi). As such, their collection “encompasses the writings by those studying the arts and literature as well as writings by social scientists, and it includes both English and French-speaking scholars” (xviii). Remi and den Toonder assert the richness of such a multitude of perspectives and approaches to exploring Canadian space, declaring that it “is characteristic of the way in which Canadian Studies is practiced nowadays...
eBook - ePubStories in Letters - Letters in Stories
Epistolary Liminalities in the Anglophone Canadian Short Story
- Rebekka Schuh(Author)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter(Publisher)
...Canadian culture as well as Canadian literature is strongly associated with in-betweenness. Historically, geographically and culturally, Canada has been shaped by a liminal position, between Great Britain and the United States. Strictly speaking, Canada has also been shaped by a tension between the indigenous and non-indigenous populations, and by a tension between French and English culture, but this has sadly been left out of discussions of Canada’s liminality. Northrop Frye, one of the pioneers of Canadian studies, stated that “Canada’s identity is to be found in some via media, or via mediocris, between the other two [the US and Great Britain]” (Frye 2009: 115). New supports this idea in his book, with the telling title Borderlands: How we speak about Canada (1998): For most of its history, Canada has been an Atlantic and an American society, looking east to Europe and south to the States for imperial roots and continental desires – so much so that (for the populations of ‘Central’ Canada) these two borders came to seem normative angles of cultural disposition. (6) Gibbins, too, refers to Canada as a “borderlands society” (as cited in Nischik 2016: 63) due to the prominence of the border with the US, and McLuhan speaks of Canada as “a land of multiple borderlines, psychic, social, and geographic” (2009 : 82). In close connection with the liminality of Canadian history and culture, Canadian literature has also been associated with liminality. Canadian literature emerged as a continuation of British literature on North American soil (Pache 1996 : 55). It “has developed in an area of conflict between the economic and cultural dominating forces of the British mother country, on the one hand, and the United States, on the other” (Pache 1996 : 55). Liminality has been part of the development of Canada and Canadian literature, and is thus deeply inscribed into the Canadian imaginary...
- Richard J. Lane(Author)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...1 Introduction First Peoples and the Colonial Narratives of Canadian Literature Overview Paradoxically, Canadian literature begins before written texts existed: with the oral stories of Canada’s First Peoples. These narratives exist today in spoken and written form, with competing accounts from different indigenous groups, and from other cultural perspectives (anthropological transcripts, for example). Colonial allegories and narratives of adventure and conquest eventually overlayered and re-interpreted indigenous stories; re-naming became a key process in the colonial claiming of cultural and economic space. Written literature, based upon European models such as the Bible and what we now simply call “the canon”, took priority, and indigenous stories were often perceived as ethnographical data, best preserved before indigenous peoples died out or were assimilated (the “vanishing Indian” myth or fantasy). But while Canada was partly formed through European and North American political battles and land-grabs, indigenous cultures continued to survive and grow with their own notions of belonging and place. After Confederation, while the story of the unified nation state continued, marginalized and oppositional voices were increasingly heard: such as those in the regions, or the Quebecois who demanded autonomy and freedom. Increasingly strong ethnic and minority groups re-shaped Canada, and the old colonial notion of uniformity or homogeneity gave way to modern ideas of heterogeneity or diversity. New narratives emerged among ethnically diverse groups, re-claiming and re-writing the stories of Canada. First Peoples and Founding Narratives Pondering “pivotal moments” in indigenous history, Mohawk writer Brian Maracle (b. 1947) rejects locating his native identity in key Canadian events as they involve “our interactions with so-called ‘white people’” (2)...
