Canadian Literature

I

Introduction

Canadian Literature, literature written in English and French by the peoples of Canada. Since its first European settlement by the English and French in the 17th and 18th centuries, Canada has evolved from a colony to a Dominion of the British Empire to an independent nation. Canadian literature with its dual cultural heritage reflects the stages in this narrative of national identity, and contemporary Canadian literature represents a postcolonial multicultural society.

II

Canadian Literature in English

Because English-speaking Canadians were more numerous and diversified than French-speaking Canadians, Canadian literature written in English has been until recently more abundant and varied than that written in French.

A

Colonial Period

Among early Canadian works in English were the accounts of 18th- and early 19th-century explorers such as Samuel Hearne, Sir Alexander Mackenzie, Simon Fraser, and David Thompson. The first novel produced in Canada, indeed in North America, was The History of Emily Montague (1769), an epistolary romance and account of contemporary Quebec, written by Frances Moore Brooke, wife of an English army chaplain.

In the early 19th century, Oliver Goldsmith wrote The Rising Village (1825), a book-length poem extolling a pioneer community, in reply to the more melancholy The Deserted Village (1770) by the British writer Oliver Goldsmith, his great-uncle. Charles Sangster, in St Lawrence and the Saguenay (1856), was one of the first poets to describe the natural beauties of the land.

Wacousta (1832) by John Richardson, about Pontiac’s Rebellion (1763) was the first novel based on Canadian history. In the humorous essays of The Clockmaker (1836), Thomas Chandler Haliburton presented the vulgar but enterprising Yankee pedlar Sam Slick as a satire on the comparatively lazy Nova Scotians. The rigours of pioneer life were described in two autobiographical books, Backwoods of Canada (1836) by Catharine Parr Traill and Roughing It in the Bush (1852) by her sister Susanna Moodie.

B

Confederation to World War I

The Confederation of 1867 encouraged a sense of national identity, which stimulated literary activity. Inspired by the English Romantics’ and early Victorians’ love of nature, Canadians looked for themes in their own natural landscape.