Canadian literature

Canadian literature

Introduction
 the body of written works produced by Canadians. Reflecting the country's dual origin and its official bilingualism, the literature of Canada can be split into two major divisions: English and French. This article provides a brief historical account of each of these literatures.

Ed.

Canadian literature in English

Prose and poetry
From settlement to 1900
      The first writers of English in Canada were visitors—explorers, travelers, and British officers and their wives—who recorded their impressions of British North America in charts, diaries, journals, and letters. These foundational documents of journeys and settlements presage the documentary tradition in Canadian literature in which geography, history, and arduous voyages of exploration and discovery represent the quest for a myth of origins and for a personal and national identity. As the critic Northrop Frye (Frye, Northrop) observed, Canadian literature is haunted by the overriding question “Where is here?”; thus, metaphoric mappings of peoples and places became central to the evolution of the Canadian literary imagination.

 The earliest documents were unadorned narratives of travel and exploration. Written in plain language, these accounts document heroic journeys to the vast, unknown west and north and encounters with Inuit and other native peoples (called First Nations in Canada), often on behalf of the Hudson's Bay Company and the North West Company, the great fur-trading companies. The explorer Samuel Hearne (Hearne, Samuel) wrote A Journey from Prince of Wales's Fort in Hudson's Bay to the Northern Ocean (1795), and Sir Alexander Mackenzie (Mackenzie, Sir Alexander), an explorer and fur trader, described his travels in Voyages from Montreal…Through the Continent of North America, to the Frozen and Pacific Oceans (1801). Simon Fraser (Fraser, Simon) recorded details of his 1808 trip west to Fraser Canyon (The Letters and Journals of Simon Fraser, 1806–1808, 1960). Captain John Franklin (Franklin, Sir John)'s published account of a British naval expedition to the Arctic, Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea (1823), and his mysterious disappearance during a subsequent journey reemerged in the 20th century in the writing of authors Margaret Atwood and Rudy Wiebe. A Narrative of the Adventures and Sufferings of John R. Jewitt (1815) is a captivity narrative that describes Jewitt's experience as a prisoner of the Nootka (Nuu-chah-nulth) (Nuu-chah-nulth) chief Maquinna after Jewitt was shipwrecked off Canada's west coast; on the whole, it presents a sympathetic ethnography of the Nuu-chah-nulth people. The Diary of Mrs. John Graves Simcoe (1911) records the everyday life in 1792–96 of the wife of the first lieutenant governor of Upper Canada (now Ontario). In 1838 Anna Jameson published Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada, an account of her travels in the New World.

      Frances Brooke, the wife of a visiting British military chaplain in the conquered French garrison of Quebec, wrote the first published novel with a Canadian setting. Her History of Emily Montague (1769) is an epistolary romance describing the sparkling winter scenery of Quebec and the life and manners of its residents.

       Halifax, in the colony of Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick's Fredericton were the scenes of the earliest literary flowering in Canada. The first literary journal, the Nova-Scotia Magazine, was published in Halifax in 1789. The town's literary activity was invigorated by an influx of loyalists during the American Revolution and by the energetic Joseph Howe (Howe, Joseph), a journalist, a poet, and the first premier of Nova Scotia. Two of the most potent influences on literary development were in evidence by the end of the 18th century: literary magazines and presses and a strong sense of regionalism. By satirizing the dialect, habits, and foibles of Nova Scotians, or Bluenoses, Thomas McCulloch, in his serialized Letters of Mephibosheth Stepsure (1821–22), and Thomas Chandler Haliburton (Haliburton, Thomas Chandler), in The Clockmaker (1835–36), featuring the brash Yankee peddler Sam Slick, adroitly brought their region to life and helped found the genre of folk humour.

      Most of the earliest poems were patriotic songs and hymns (The Loyal Verses of Joseph Stansbury and Doctor Jonathan Odell, 1860) or topographical narratives, reflecting the first visitors' concern with discovering and naming the new land and its inhabitants. In The Rising Village (1825), native-born Oliver Goldsmith used heroic couplets to celebrate pioneer life and the growth of Nova Scotia, which, in his words, promised to be “the wonder of the Western Skies.” His optimistic tones were a direct response to the melancholy poem written by his Anglo-Irish granduncle, Oliver Goldsmith (Goldsmith, Oliver), whose The Deserted Village (1770) concludes with the forced emigration of dispossessed villagers.

      Immigrants, dreaming of a new Eden but encountering instead the realities of unpredictable native peoples, a fierce climate, unfamiliar wildlife, and physical and cultural deprivation, were the subject of prose sketches by the Strickland sisters, Susanna Strickland Moodie (Moodie, Susanna Strickland) and Catherine Parr Strickland Traill (Traill, Catherine Parr). Moodie's harsh, yet at times comical, Roughing It in the Bush (1852) was written to discourage prospective emigrants, but Traill's Backwoods of Canada (1836) presents a more favourable picture of the New World.

      The Dominion of Canada, created in 1867 by the confederation of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Upper Canada, and Lower Canada (now Quebec), precipitated a flurry of patriotic and literary activity. The so-called Confederation poets (Confederation group) turned to the landscape in their search for a truly native verse. Unlike their predecessors, they no longer merely described or moralized nature but attempted to capture what the Ottawa poet Archibald Lampman (Lampman, Archibald) called the “answering harmony between the soul of the poet and the spirit and mystery of nature.” New Brunswick poet Charles G.D. Roberts (Roberts, Sir Charles G.D.) inspired his cousin, the prolific and vagabond Bliss Carman (Carman, Bliss), as well as Lampman and Duncan Campbell Scott (Scott, Duncan Campbell), also an Ottawa poet, to begin writing verse. Lampman is known for his meditations on the landscape. Scott, who was a government administrator, has become better known for advocating the assimilation of First Nation peoples than for his poetry's depiction of Canada's northern wilderness. Perhaps the most original poet of this period was Isabella Valancy Crawford (Crawford, Isabella Valancy), whose colourful mythopoeic verse, with its images drawn from the lore of native peoples, pioneer life, mythology, and a symbolic animated nature, was published as Old Spookses' Pass, Malcolm's Katie, and Other Poems in 1884.

      The historical romance was the most popular form of novel. Seigneurial life in New France provided the setting for Julia Catherine Beckwith Hart's melodramatic St. Ursula's Convent; or, The Nun of Canada (1824) and William Kirby (Kirby, William)'s gothic tale The Golden Dog (1877), while Rosanna Leprohon's romance Antoinette de Mirecourt; or, Secret Marrying and Secret Sorrowing (1864) depicted life in Quebec after the English conquest in 1759. In Wacousta; or, The Prophecy (1832), John Richardson (Richardson, John) portrayed the 1763 uprising led by Pontiac, chief of the Ottawa Indians, at Fort Detroit. However, James De Mille (De Mille, James)'s satiric travel fantasy A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder (1888) and Roberts's renowned quasi-documentary animal stories (Earth's Enigmas, 1896; The Kindred of the Wild, 1902) represented different and original fictional forms.

Modern period, 1900–60
      In the early 20th century, popular poets responding to the interest in local colour depicted French Canadian customs and dialect (W.H. Drummond, The Habitant and Other French-Canadian Poems, 1897), the Mohawk tribe and rituals (E. Pauline Johnson, Legends of Vancouver, 1911; Flint and Feather, 1912), and the freedom and romance of the north (Robert Service, Songs of a Sourdough, 1907). John McCrae's account of World War I, "In Flanders Fields" (1915), remains Canada's best-known poem. Slowly a reaction against sentimental, patriotic, and derivative Victorian verse set in. E.J. Pratt (Pratt, E.J.) created a distinctive style both in lyric poems of seabound Newfoundland life (Newfoundland Verse, 1923) and in the epic narratives The Titanic (1935), Brébeuf and His Brethren (1940), and Towards the Last Spike (1952), which through their reliance on accurate detail participate in the documentary tradition. Influenced by Pratt, Earle Birney (Birney, Earle), another innovative and experimental poet, published the frequently anthologized tragic narrative "David" (1942), the first of many audacious, technically varied poems exploring the troubling nature of humanity and the cosmos. His publications include the verse play Trial of a City and Other Verse (1952) and poetic collections such as Rag & Bone Shop (1971) and Ghost in the Wheels (1977).

      Toronto's Canadian Forum (founded in 1920), which Birney edited from 1936 to 1940, and Montreal's McGill Fortnightly Review (1925–27) provided an outlet for the “new poetry” and the emergence of Modernism. Here and in their anthology New Provinces (1936), A.J.M. Smith (Smith, A.J.M.), F.R. Scott (Scott, Francis Reginald), and A.M. Klein (Klein, A.M.) began their long literary careers. Emphasizing concrete images, open language, and free verse, these modernists felt that the poet's task was to identify, name, and take possession of the land. Klein wrote in "Portrait of the Poet as Landscape" (1948) that the poet is “the nth Adam taking a green inventory / in a world but scarcely uttered, naming, praising.” The bonds of a colonial frame of mind characterized by fear of the unknown, reliance on convention, a puritan consciousness—what Frye (Frye, Northrop), in the "Conclusion" written for the first edition of the Literary History of Canada (1965), called the “garrison mentality”—were being broken and cast off.

      Strong reaction to the Great Depression, the rise of fascism, and World War II dominated the poems of the 1930s and '40s. Using the documentary mode, Dorothy Livesay (Livesay, Dorothy) condemned the exploitation of workers in Day and Night (1944), while her lyric poems spoke frankly of sexual love (Signpost, 1932). In opposition to the cosmopolitan and metaphysical verse promoted by Smith and the literary magazine Preview (1942–45), Irving Layton (Layton, Irving), Louis Dudek (Dudek, Louis), and Raymond Souster—through their little magazine Contact (1952–54) and their publishing house, the Contact Press (1952–67)—urged poets to focus on realism and the local North American context. P.K. Page, one of Canada's most intellectually rigorous poets, was associated with the Preview group in the '40s when she published her first collection, As Ten as Twenty (1946), which includes the evocative renowned poem "Stories of Snow." Page's later work increasingly reflected her interest in esoteric places, forms, and religions, from Sufism (Evening Dance of the Grey Flies, 1981) to the glosa, a Spanish poetic form (Hologram: A Book of Glosas, 1994).

      By 1900 novels of local colour were beginning to overshadow historical romances. Lucy Maud Montgomery (Montgomery, Lucy Maud)'s beloved children's book Anne of Green Gables (1908) and its sequels were set in Prince Edward Island. Ontario towns and their “garrison mentality” provided the setting for Sara Jeannette Duncan's portrayal of political life in The Imperialist (1904), Ralph Connor (Connor, Ralph)'s The Man from Glengarry (1901), Stephen Leacock (Leacock, Stephen)'s satiric stories Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (1912), and Mazo de la Roche (de la Roche, Mazo)'s best-selling Jalna series (1927–60). Out of the Prairies emerged the novel of social realism, which documented the small, often narrow-minded farming communities pitted against an implacable nature. Martha Ostenso's Wild Geese (1925), a tale of a strong young girl in thrall to her cruel father, and Frederick Philip Grove (Grove, Frederick Philip)'s Settlers of the Marsh (1925) and Fruits of the Earth (1933), depicting man's struggle for mastery of himself and his land, are moving testaments to the courage of farmers. Painter Emily Carr (Carr, Emily) wrote stories about her childhood and her visits to First Nations sites in British Columbia (Klee Wyck, 1941).

      A tentativeness in form and subject matter pervades the novels published during the 1940s and '50s and is reflected in their protagonists, most of whom are sensitive, restless children or artists. In this category fall the Prairie novels As for Me and My House (1941) by Sinclair Ross, Who Has Seen the Wind (1947) by W.O. Mitchell (Mitchell, W.O.), and The Mountain and the Valley (1952) by Ernest Buckler, set in Nova Scotia's Annapolis valley. These novels strain the bonds of conventional narrative structures as they shift from social realism toward lyricism. In the panoramic Two Solitudes (1945) and The Watch That Ends the Night (1959), framed against the backdrop of the two world wars, Hugh MacLennan (MacLennan, Hugh) attempted to capture moral, social, and religious conflicts that rent individuals, families, and the French and English communities in Quebec. Sheila Watson's enigmatic and mythic The Double Hook (1959) and Ethel Wilson's Swamp Angel (1954), about a Vancouver housewife's bid for personal freedom, present quest journeys against the striking backdrop of British Columbia's interior. Elizabeth Smart's incantatory novel By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept (1945) is a frank and poetic account of obsessive love.

1960 and beyond

      After the 1950s this tentativeness in fiction either became itself the subject of the novel or was dissipated in more confident forms of writing. Robertson Davies (Davies, Robertson)' popular Deptford trilogy (Fifth Business, 1970; The Manticore, 1972; World of Wonders, 1975) examines the growth of its protagonists into maturity within a Jungian paradigm. Exploration of Canadian identity and of the world of art form much of the interest of Davies' Cornish trilogy (The Rebel Angels, 1981; What's Bred in the Bone, 1985; The Lyre of Orpheus, 1988) and Murther & Walking Spirits (1991). Alice Munro (Munro, Alice) in Lives of Girls and Women (1971), set in southwestern Ontario, and Margaret Laurence (Laurence, Margaret) in her Manawaka novels (The Stone Angel, 1964; A Jest of God, 1966; The Diviners, 1974) explored their heroines' rebellion against a constricting small-town heritage. Munro's short stories—in collections ranging from Dance of the Happy Shades (1968) to The View from Castle Rock (2006)—depict the domestic lives and relationships of women in Toronto, small-town Ontario, and British Columbia in an increasingly enigmatic style. Leonard Cohen (Cohen, Leonard)'s Beautiful Losers (1966) probes the relationship between sainthood, violence, eroticism, and artistic creativity. Mavis Gallant (Gallant, Mavis)'s stories depict isolated characters whose fragile worlds of illusion are shattered (The Selected Stories of Mavis Gallant, 1996). In her collection of stories Across the Bridge (1993), she probes the thin line between good and evil in the lives of ordinary people.

 With trenchant irony, Margaret Atwood (Atwood, Margaret) dissected contemporary urban life and sexual politics in The Edible Woman (1969), Lady Oracle (1976), and The Robber Bride (1993). Bodily Harm (1981), The Handmaid's Tale (1985), and the speculative Oryx and Crake (2003) are cautionary tales of political violence and dystopia, while Alias Grace (1996) and The Blind Assassin (2000), winner of the Booker Prize, are situated in a meticulously researched historical Ontario and expose the secret worlds of women and the ambiguous nature of truth and justice. Set in Montreal, London, and Paris, Mordecai Richler (Richler, Mordecai)'s novels The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1959), St. Urbain's Horseman (1971), Joshua Then and Now (1980), Solomon Gursky Was Here (1989), and Barney's Version (1997) satirize the condition and hypocrisy of modern society through black humour.

      Many writers publishing in the 1960s and '70s subverted the traditional conventions of fiction, shifting from realist to surrealist, self-reflexive, feminist, or parodic modes. Although historical events and the investigation of place as an imaginative source remained the most common subject matters, the narrative forms were experimental and playful. During the 1980s and '90s, writers also renegotiated ideas of self and nation and of belonging and loss while breaking down traditional boundaries of both gender and genre. Robert Kroetsch's trilogy The Words of My Roaring (1966), The Studhorse Man (1969), and Gone Indian (1973) transformed the realism of Prairie fiction into postmodern parodies of the quest journey. In The Temptations of Big Bear (1973), The Scorched-Wood People (1977), and A Discovery of Strangers (1994), Rudy Wiebe constructed fictional and spiritual epics based on historical events in the west and the precarious relations between First Nations and European explorers and settlers. In The Wars (1977), Timothy Findley (Findley, Timothy)'s narrator, through letters, clippings, and photographs, re-creates the effects of World War I on his hero. Famous Last Words (1981) and Not Wanted on the Voyage (1984), the latter a retelling of the voyage of Noah's ark, are also historical metafictions that point to dangerous fascistic tendencies in the modern state.

      George Bowering's Burning Water (1980), which focuses on the 18th-century explorer George Vancouver, and Michael Ondaatje (Ondaatje, Michael)'s Coming Through Slaughter (1976), the story of the jazz musician Buddy Bolden (Bolden, Buddy), mingle history with autobiography in self-reflexive narratives that enact the process of writing. Ranging from 1920s Toronto (In the Skin of a Lion, 1987) to Italy during World War II (The English Patient, 1992; Booker Prize) and Sri Lanka wracked by civil war (Anil's Ghost, 2000), Ondaatje's lyrical, elliptical narratives spotlight a small coterie of people drawn together by a mystery that shapes the story and governs their lives.

      Carol Shields (Shields, Carol)'s novels, stories, and plays present the lives of ordinary women and men in a luminous, often gently satiric style. The Stone Diaries (1993), which won a Pulitzer Prize, begins in early 20th-century Manitoba and follows the life of Daisy from birth to death in a variety of voices and textual strategies, while in Unless (2002) a middle-aged professional woman confronts the nature of goodness and the disintegration of a comfortable family life. Audrey Thomas (Thomas, Audrey) reveals the dilemmas confronting women in innovative short stories (Real Mothers [1981]) and novels (Intertidal Life, 1984; Graven Images, 1993; Isobel Gunn, 1999). Jack Hodgins maps a surreal island world in The Invention of the World (1977) and The Macken Charm (1995), mock-epics that both feature larger-than-life, eccentric characters and tell a colourful history of Vancouver Island. Fascinated by the imprint of the past on present lives, Jane Urquhart uses the symbol of the whirlpool to weave together stories of Canadians in 19th-century Ontario in The Whirlpool (1986); Away (1993), a lyrical saga, recounts in retrospect the life of a woman who emigrated from Ireland to Canada in the 1840s, and A Map of Glass (2005) depicts a reclusive heroine seeking answers to her lover's disappearance. Traces of history also haunt Anne Michaels's lyrical novel Fugitive Pieces (1996), in which the story of an émigré Polish poet in Toronto, rescued as a boy from the Nazis, intersects with that of a young professor, a child of Holocaust survivors. Daphne Marlatt radically revises family and colonial history, narrative, and sexuality in Ana Historic (1988) and Taken (1996). Douglas Glover's Rabelaisian Elle (2003) chronicles the adventures of a young French woman marooned during Jacques Cartier's 1541–42 voyage to Canada. Douglas Coupland (Coupland, Douglas) spawned a new vocabulary with Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture (1991).

      Although the subject of history exerts a powerful influence on all forms of Canadian writing, the tradition of regional fiction has not lost its momentum. David Adams Richards's novels depict the bleakness of New Brunswick communities (Lives of Short Duration, 1981; Nights Below Station Street, 1988; Mercy Among the Children, 2000), while Guy Vanderhaeghe's fiction has its roots in the Prairies (The Englishman's Boy, 1996). In Clara Callan (2001), Richard B. Wright portrays quiet lives in small-town Ontario. Ann-Marie MacDonald's Fall on Your Knees (1996) and Alistair MacLeod's No Great Mischief (1999) recount family sagas set on Cape Breton Island. Wayne Johnston depicts Newfoundland's history in The Colony of Unrequited Dreams (1998), a novel based on the life of Joey Smallwood (Smallwood, Joseph Roberts), the province's dynamic first premier. In River Thieves (2001), Michael Crummey describes the extinction of the Beothuk, an indigenous people of Newfoundland, and Lisa Moore's Alligator (2005) dissects lives in contemporary St. John's, the capital of Newfoundland and Labrador province.

      During the 1980s and '90s, increasing attention was also paid to the plurality and diversity of voices across the country. This period saw the emergence of numerous First Nations, Métis, and Inuit writers. Resisting the imposition of Western concepts of history, land, nation, society, and narrative, many of these writers explored their oral traditions, myths, and cultural practices. A recurring theme is the individual's painful trajectory as that individual negotiates between cultures, combats racial prejudice, and copes with shattered families and kinship groups; these concerns are also rendered in playful or parodic modes, as protest literature, or as alternatives to frenetic urban consumer cultures. Works that engage these concerns include novels and stories by Jeannette Armstrong (Slash, 1985, rev. ed. 1988; Whispering in Shadows, 2000), Beatrice Culleton (In Search of April Raintree, 1983), Tomson Highway (Kiss of the Fur Queen, 1998), Thomas King (Medicine River, 1990; Green Grass, Running Water, 1993), and Eden Robinson (Monkey Beach, 1999; Blood Sports, 2006). Autobiography and memoir—Maria Campbell's Half-Breed (1973) and Lee Maracle's Bobbi Lee, Indian Rebel (1975, rev. ed. 1990), for example—are key genres in First Nations (Native American) witnessing and testimony. These genres are also a part of the life writing (which also includes biography, biofiction, letters, and diaries) that dominates the field of Canadian literature and resonates with the tradition of documentary writing; examples include Ondaatje's Running in the Family (1982), John Glassco (Glassco, John)'s Memoirs of Montparnasse (1970), Aritha van Herk's Places Far from Ellesmere (1990), Wayson Choy's Paper Shadows: A Chinatown Childhood (1999), Dionne Brand's A Map to the Door of No Return (2001), and Wiebe and Yvonne Johnson's Stolen Life: The Journey of a Cree Woman (1998).

      Other perspectives tackle the experiences of immigrants—their interrogation of the meaning of home and belonging, their feelings of cultural assimilation and estrangement, and their intergenerational struggles. Nino Ricci, a Canadian of Italian descent, portrays the long journey from Italy to Canada in his trilogy Lives of the Saints (1990), In a Glass House (1993), and Where She Has Gone (1997). In her lyrical and meditative novels Plainsong (1993), The Mark of the Angel (1999), and Prodigy (2000), Nancy Huston (Huston, Nancy), an expatriate in Paris, reflects on dislocation and exile. Yann Martel's Life of Pi (2001), winner of the Booker Prize, depicts the fantastic voyage of 16-year-old Pi, who, en route to Canada from India, is shipwrecked and left adrift on the Pacific with several zoo animals.

      Asian Canadian writing has emerged as a powerful and innovative force. Joy Kogawa's Obasan (1981) is a skillful “docufiction” describing the internment of Japanese Canadians during World War II; in Chorus of Mushrooms (1994), Hiromi Goto examines the relations between three generations of women in rural Alberta. Chinese Canadian perspectives are presented in Choy's The Jade Peony (1995), set in Vancouver's Chinatown; Larissa Lai's multilayered exploration of lesbian awakening, When Fox Is a Thousand (1995); and Sky Lee's Disappearing Moon Café (1990). Rohinton Mistry's Tales from Firozsha Baag (1987), Such a Long Journey (1991), A Fine Balance (1995), and Family Matters (2001) are set mostly in Bombay (now Mumbai) among the Parsi community, while Anita Rau Badami's novels Tamarind Mem (1996) and The Hero's Walk (2000) portray the cross-cultural effect on Indian families in India and Canada.

      The poetry and fiction of George Elliott Clarke uncover the forgotten history of Canadian blacks, and Dionne Brand's At the Full and Change of the Moon (1999) and Makeda Silvera's The Heart Does Not Bend (2002) construct generational sagas of the African and Caribbean slave diaspora and immigrant life in Canada. Like Brand and Silvera, Shani Mootoo, whose Cereus Blooms at Night (1996) and He Drown She in the Sea (2005) unfold on a lush fictional Caribbean island, commemorates strong, disturbing matriarchal figures.

Poetry and poetics
      Fueled by fervent literary nationalism and anti-Americanism, by the expansion of new presses and literary magazines, and by the beckoning of avant-garde forms, poetry blossomed after 1960. Prolific, ribald, and iconoclastic, Irving Layton (Layton, Irving) published 48 volumes of poetry celebrating life in memorable lyric lines and lambasting Canadian sexual puritanism and social and political cowardice. Much admired for his The Martyrology (books 1–9, 1972–93), an investigation into language and the self, bp Nichol (Barrie Phillip Nichol) explored concrete and sound poetry, as did bill bissett and Steve McCaffery. Many of Canada's novelists—including Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, George Bowering, Leonard Cohen, and Dionne Brand—were poets first. Atwood's The Circle Game (1966), Power Politics (1971), and Two-Headed Poems (1978) are laconic, ironic commentaries on contemporary mores and sexual politics: “you fit into me / like a hook into an eye / a fish hook / an open eye.” In The Journals of Susanna Moodie (1970), Atwood translated the 19th-century author (Moodie, Susanna Strickland) of Roughing It in the Bush into a modern figure of alienation. Her Morning in the Burned House (1995) invokes popular and classical myths, the elegy, history, and the personal lyric. Ondaatje also turned to historical personae in his collage The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (1970), as did Bowering in his long poem George, Vancouver (1970). Daphne Marlatt reinvented a fishing and canning town's past in Steveston (1974), and Robert Kroetsch explored his Prairie roots in Field Notes (1981)—both important examples, along with Bowering's Kerrisdale Elegies (1984), of the serial long poem, another variation on the documentary mode. In Handwriting (1998) Ondaatje returned to his birthplace, Sri Lanka. Fascination with place and history also permeates Al Purdy (Purdy, Al)'s poems about the country north of Belleville, Ont., and about his travels west and to the Arctic (Being Alive, 1978) and to the Soviet Union (Piling Blood, 1984; The Collected Poems of Al Purdy, 1986). The landscape of southwestern Saskatchewan figures centrally in the poetry of Lorna Crozier (Angels of Flesh, Angels of Silence, 1988; What the Living Won't Let Go, 1999). Also from Saskatchewan, Karen Solie (Short Haul Engine, 2001; Modern and Normal, 2005) is intrigued by physics, fractals, and the landscape. Fred Wah, one of the founders (along with Bowering and Frank Davey) of the Vancouver poetry magazine Tish, explored his roots in the Kootenays in Pictograms from the Interior of B.C. (1975), later turning to his mixed heritage and Chinese background in Rooftops (1988) and So Far (1991). David Zieroth (who has also published as Dale Zieroth) recalled his childhood on a Manitoba farm in When the Stones Fly Up (1985) and The Village of Sliding Time (2006) and meditated on everyday moments in Crows Do Not Have Retirement (2001).

      Margaret Avison (Avison, Margaret) (Winter Sun/The Dumbfounding, 1982), Anne Wilkinson (The Collected Poems of Anne Wilkinson, 1968), Gwendolyn MacEwen (The Poetry of Gwendolyn MacEwen, 1994), Phyllis Webb (Selected Poems: The Vision Tree, 1982), D.G. Jones (A Throw of Particles, 1983; Grounding Sight, 1999), E.D. Blodgett (Apostrophes series), and Don Coles (Forests of the Medieval World, 1993; Kurgan, 2000) grapple with metaphysical and mystical concerns through images drawn from places, travel, mythology, and nature. Sharon Thesen (The Beginning of the Long Dash, 1987; Aurora, 1995; A Pair of Scissors, 2001) and Don McKay (Field Marks, 2006) spin evocative poems out of historical events, key personages, the natural world, and the quotidian. The desire of women to express their distinctive voices and experiences in nonconventional forms also resulted in a surge of feminist (women's movement) literary journals (Room of One's Own, Atlantis, Tessera, Fireweed) and presses. Collections by Marlatt (Touch to My Tongue, 1984; This Tremor Love Is, 2001) and Di Brandt (Questions I Asked My Mother, 1987; Jerusalem, Beloved, 1995) reenvision language, sexuality, and subjectivity through a feminist, lesbian, and theoretical lens. Anne Carson writes playful poems that interweave contemporary and past voices. In Autobiography of Red (1998)—the story of the winged red monster Geryon and his doomed love for Herakles—she draws on the Greek poet Stesichoros, while in The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos (2001) she invokes English poet John Keats. A classics scholar, Carson has also translated Euripides' plays (Grief Lessons, 2006) and Sappho's poems (If Not, Winter, 2002). Poets who engage in virtuoso and highly experimental probings of language include Lisa Robertson (XEclogue, 1993, rev. ed. 1999; The Weather, 2001) and Christian Bök (Eunoia, 2001). In Sheep's Vigil by a Fervent Person (2001) and Little Theatres; or, Aturuxos Calados (2005), Erin Mouré offers inventive translations of Portuguese and Galician authors as she explores ideas of local and global citizenship and community.

      Inflected by anger and sorrow, Marie Annharte Baker (Being on the Moon, 1990), Chrystos (Fire Power, 1995), Beth Brant (Mohawk Trail, 1985), and Marilyn Dumont (A Really Good Brown Girl, 1996) protest stereotypes of First Nations and Métis. Dionne Brand's No Language Is Neutral (1990) and Marlene Nourbese Philip's She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks (1988) challenge the colonization, sexism, and racism of the English language, while George Elliott Clarke's collage Whylah Falls (1990) uncovers the life of Canadian blacks in a 1930s Nova Scotia village. In mapping arrivals and departures through an increasing diversity of voices and selves, celebrating and mourning differences, and protesting coercion, constraint, and smugness in a bountiful array of forms from sonnet to ghazal to documentary long poem, Canadian poets have opened the country of the mind and the minds of the country.

      Like the poets and novelists, Canadian dramatists in their quest for a myth of origins have often turned to historical incidents. The earliest forms of dramatic writing, Charles Mair's Tecumseh (1886) and Sarah Anne Curzon's Laura Secord, the Heroine of 1812 (1887), both based on the War of 1812, were in verse. In the 1920s and '30s Merrill Denison, Gwen Pharis Ringwood, and Herman Voaden struggled to establish Canadian drama, relying on the amateur little theatres for support. By the 1950s and '60s several professional theatres had been successfully established, producing a more sophisticated milieu for dramatists such as John Coulter, whose Riel (1962) creates a heroic figure of Louis Riel (Riel, Louis), the leader of the Métis rebellion in 1885. As regional and experimental theatres multiplied, increasingly innovative and daring productions were mounted, such as John Herbert's Fortune and Men's Eyes (1967), on homosexuality in prison; George Ryga's The Ecstasy of Rita Joe (1971), about an indigenous woman who is a prostitute; and James Reaney (Reaney, James Crerar)'s Donnelly trilogy (1976–77), about the feuds and the massacre of an Irish immigrant family in southern Ontario.

      During the 1970s, groups such as Toronto's Theatre Passe Muraille experimented with collective productions in which actors participated in script writing and which were performed in nontraditional venues (e.g., barns). Collective creation resulted in The Farm Show (1976), Paper Wheat (1978), 1837 (1976), and Les Canadiens (1977); all exhibit a strong sense of locality, history, and issues of identity and nation. Stark realism shaped David Freeman's Creeps (1972), David French's Leaving Home (1977), David Fennario's On the Job (1976), and Michael Cook's The Head, Guts, and Sound Bone Dance (1974). Women's lives in the past are the focus of Carol Bolt's Red Emma (1974), the story of the anarchist Emma Goldman; Sharon Pollock's Blood Relations (1981), a powerful drama about the accused murderer Lizzie Borden; and Betty Lambert's Jennie's Story (1984). Joanna Glass's plays, ranging from Artichoke (1975) to Trying (2005), explore intergenerational conflicts and women's issues. The plays of Judith Thompson, which gain their shape from dreams and the effects of dreams, are visually exciting explorations of the evil force in the human subconscious (The Crackwalker, 1980; Lion in the Streets, 1990). In Billy Bishop Goes to War (1981), John Gray created a very popular musical from the story of a well-known World War I fighter pilot. Green Thumb Theatre, founded in 1975, pioneered plays for young audiences on such issues as bullying, divorce, and immigrants.

      Influenced by film and questioning conventional forms and their attendant ideologies, George Walker produced an impressive body of work, including Nothing Sacred (1988), an adaptation of Turgenev's Father and Sons; Criminals in Love (1985), set in Toronto's working-class east end; and Suburban Motel (1997), a cycle of six plays set in a motel room. Playwright and actor Morris Panych achieved renown for the nonverbal The Overcoat (1997), 7 Stories (1990), and Girl in the Goldfish Bowl (2003). Michael Healey's critically acclaimed The Drawer Boy (1999), set in 1972, depicts the turbulent relationship between two farmers and a young actor researching rural life for the creation of The Farm Show. First Nations writers began to make a strong impact following the success of Tomson Highway's The Rez Sisters (1988), which he later followed with Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing (1989) and Ernestine Shuswap Gets Her Trout (2005). Marie Clements (The Unnatural and Accidental Women, 2005), Margo Kane (Confessions of an Indian Cowboy, 2001), Monique Mojica (Princess Pocahontas and the Blue Spots, 1991), Daniel David Moses (The Indian Medicine Shows, 1995), and Drew Hayden Taylor (Toronto at Dreamer's Rock, 1990; In a World Created by a Drunken God, 2006) expose the stereotypes and dilemmas of different First Nations peoples and their troubled relation to the dominant culture, often making effective and comic use of indigenous languages and myths.

      Joan MacLeod's Amigo's Blue Guitar (1990) explores the effect of a Salvadorean refugee on a Canadian family. Ann-Marie MacDonald's Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet) (1990), which juxtaposes a contemporary academic with Shakespeare's Othello, Romeo, and Juliet, has been produced across Canada and worldwide. Brad Fraser's quirky Unidentified Human Remains and the True Nature of Love (1990) presents seven disturbing characters communicating through an answering machine. Norm Foster, with more than 30 light comedies (e.g., The Melville Boys, 1986), has become the country's most successful dramatist. The voices of other Canadian communities were increasingly heard in the late 20th century: African (George Elliott Clarke, Beatrice Chancy, 1999), South Asian (Rahul Varma, No Man's Land [published in Canadian Mosaic: 6 Plays, 1995]), Japanese (R.A. Shiomi, Yellow Fever, 1984), and Chinese (Marty Chan, Mom, Dad, I'm Living with a White Girl, first performed 1995).

      At the beginning of the 21st century, several collective and multimedia companies emphasized physical and visual experimentation akin to the avant-garde traditions in contemporary Quebec productions, including One Yellow Rabbit in Calgary, Necessary Angel, da da kamera, Theatre Smith-Gilmour, and Theatre Columbus in Toronto, and Electric Company and Boca del Lupo in Vancouver.

Kathy Mezei

Canadian literature in French (French literature)

The French language in Canada
 The valley of the St. Lawrence River, first explored by Jacques Cartier during his second voyage to North America in 1535, was colonized by France during the 17th and 18th centuries. The first French settlement was established in 1605 at Port-Royal, near present-day Annapolis Royal, Nova Scotia. In 1713 France permanently ceded to Britain most of the territory known as Acadia but maintained its hold over New France. As the territorial struggle continued, the British were increasingly frustrated by the reluctance of the Acadians, also referred to as the “neutral French,” to pledge allegiance to the British regime, and between 1755 and 1762 approximately 10,000 Acadians were forcibly deported. With the fall of the city of Quebec in 1759, the British gained control of New France. When the Treaty of Paris in 1763 officially confirmed British rule over New France, the predominantly Roman Catholic population of more than 60,000 persons spoke a language that was already a blend of several French dialects, although French was then not yet standardized in France itself.

      After 1763 immigration from France virtually ceased, but the number of French-speaking inhabitants continued to increase. Today about five-sixths of Canada's Francophones live in the province of Quebec. The remainder form a linguistic minority among predominantly English-speaking communities in other provinces. In many cases they have established vibrant, culturally active subcommunities, most notably in the Maritime Provinces, particularly New Brunswick, which is officially bilingual; in northern Ontario; and, to a lesser extent, in the western provinces. As Quebec nationalism led the province's inhabitants to adopt the term Québécois to describe themselves from the 1960s, the term French Canadian was increasingly applied primarily to the Francophone minorities outside Quebec. (Today, however, many Canadians outside Quebec use the term French Canadian to refer to all French-speaking Canadians.) Although French Canadian literature is often considered separately from Quebec literature, this article examines both.

The French regime, 1535–1763
 During the two centuries of French rule, not a page of French was printed in New France; there was no printing press in the colony until after the establishment of British control. The substantial colonial literature written in and about New France was published in France for a European audience. It included accounts of discovery and exploration, official reports and correspondence, travelers' narratives, annals of missions and religious communities, and histories of the colony. Credit for the first theatre production written in New France belongs to Marc Lescarbot, whose pageant Le Théâtre de Neptune en la Nouvelle-France (The Theatre of Neptune in New France) was presented at Port-Royal in 1606. On his return to France, he published in 1609 Histoire de la Nouvelle-France (History of New France) and Les Muses de la Nouvelle France (“The Muses of New France”), the latter containing his poetry and drama. The most important of the missionary annals is Les Relations des Jésuites (1632–1673; The Jesuit Relations), which gives a fascinating glimpse into the life of the missionaries and their relationship with Canada's native peoples. Also of interest are the writings, particularly the correspondence, of Marie de l'Incarnation, the first mother superior of the Ursuline nuns of New France. The colony also possessed an abundant oral literature composed of folk songs, folktales, and legends. Considerable scholarly effort has been expended on the recovery and study of the rich heritage of oral traditions and literary works surviving from the French period.

After the British conquest, 1763–1830
      After the devastation of the Seven Years' War, intellectual life was for a time inconceivable. During the first 70 years of British rule, journalism was vitally important to the French-speaking majority. The bilingual Quebec Gazette (1764) and, later, French-language newspapers (newspaper) such as Le Canadien (1806) and La Minerve (1826) offered the only medium of mass communication, of contact with Europe and the United States, and of political expression at home. The first scattered indications of literature (anecdotes, poems, essays, and sermons) appeared in their pages, as did the verses and songs of two French immigrants, Joseph Quesnel and Joseph Mermet. Quesnel, French Canada's first significant writer, also composed dramatic texts for amateur actors; his comedy Colas et Colinette (1808; Eng. trans. Colas et Colinette), first acted on stage in 1790, was revived as a radio play in 1968.

The literature
Early literature, 1830–60
      Publication of French Canadian literature in Canada began in the 1830s. The first collection of verse—Epîtres, satires, chansons, épigrammes, et autres pièces de vers (“Epistles, Satires, Songs, Epigrams, and Other Pieces of Verse”) by Michel Bibaud (Bibaud, Michel)—appeared in 1830; the first novel—L'Influence d'un livre (Influence of a Book) by Philippe-Ignace-François Aubert de Gaspé—was published in 1837. In drama two works of note were the comedy Griphon; ou, la vengeance d'un valet (1837; “Gryphon; or, The Vengeance of a Valet”) by Pierre Petitclair, the first play published by a native-born French Canadian, and Le Jeune Latour (1844; “The Young Latour”) by Antoine Gérin-Lajoie (Gérin-Lajoie, Antoine), Canadian theatre's first tragedy. This literary development reflected in part the gradual organization of primary and secondary education and the increasing availability of French books and periodicals even before the resumption of commercial relations with France in 1855. More important was a growing sense of national identity, apparent in the campaigns for responsible government that preceded and followed the ill-fated rebellions against British rule in 1837 and 1838. The principal publication of the time, François-Xavier Garneau (Garneau, François-Xavier)'s Histoire du Canada depuis sa découverte jusqu'à nos jours (1845–48; History of Canada from the Time of Its Discovery Till the Union Year [1840–41]), embodied the new spirit of nationalism.

The literary movement of 1860
      Under the Act of Union (1840), the peripatetic parliament of Upper and Lower Canada moved in 1859 to Quebec city, along with its clerks and public servants. The capital, being also the seat of the newly founded Laval University (1852), was an ideal setting for French Canada's first literary grouping, sometimes referred to as the École Patriotique de Québec (Patriotic School of Quebec) or the Mouvement Littéraire de Québec (Literary Movement of Quebec). Often congregating at the bookstore of poet Octave Crémazie (Crémazie, Octave), its dozen members shared patriotic, conservative, and strongly Roman Catholic convictions about the survival of French Canada. Their spokesman, Henri-Raymond Casgrain, promoted a messianic view of the spiritual mission of French Canadians in North America, now that postrevolutionary France had fallen into what he perceived to be godlessness and materialism. Only a few French Romantic writers were admired and imitated. Philippe Aubert de Gaspé (Gaspé, Philippe Aubert de)'s historical romance of the period of British conquest, Les Anciens Canadiens (1863; The Canadians of Old); Gérin-Lajoie (Gérin-Lajoie, Antoine)'s colonization novel, Jean Rivard (1862–64; Eng. trans. Jean Rivard); and numerous collections of verse by Pamphile Lemay (Les Gouttelettes [1904; "The Droplets"]) and Louis-Honoré Fréchette (Fréchette, Louis-Honoré) (La Légende d'un peuple [1887; “The Legend of a People”]) illustrate the nostalgic and didactic preoccupations of the time. More original works were nevertheless attempted: Eudore Evanturel's Premières poésies (1878; “First Poems”) broke with conventional imagery, and Quebec's first woman novelist, Laure Conan (the pen name of Marie-Louise-Félicité Angers), published a sophisticated psychological novel, Angéline de Montbrun (1881–82; Eng. trans. Angéline de Montbrun).

The Montreal School, 1895–1935
      By the end of the century, Montreal had become the province's commercial metropolis, and the next literary movement was founded there by Jean Charbonneau (Charbonneau, Jean) and Louvigny de Montigny in 1895 with the École Littéraire de Montréal (Montreal Literary School). The society continued to exist, although intermittently, for nearly 40 years. Its members published extensively, mostly in verse; organized four large public sessions in 1898–99; and issued two collective volumes of their writings, in 1900 and 1925. Their literary doctrine was eclectic, although chiefly influenced by the Parnassian and Symbolist (Symbolist movement) movements in France and Belgium.

 The Montreal School included the first French Canadian poet who can be compared favourably with his French contemporaries. Émile Nelligan (Nelligan, Émile), indisputably a genius, composed all his poetry during his teens (1896–99) before lapsing into insanity. His intricate sonnets and rondels were published in 1903 by the critic Louis Dantin (the pen name of Eugène Seers (Seers, Eugène)). Another Montreal School poet of note was the invalid Albert Lozeau (L'Âme solitaire [1907; “The Solitary Soul”]).

      During the first decade of the 20th century, two main literary groups emerged, the aesthetes (Aestheticism) (exotistes) and the regionalists. The aesthetes, among them René Chopin, Marcel Dugas, Paul Morin, and Robert de Roquebrune, had studied in Paris and were fascinated by contemporary French literature and culture. They founded a short-lived artistic magazine, Le Nigog (“The Harpoon”), in 1918, but they remained a tiny minority, often denounced as dilettantes. It was the regionalists (Gonzalve Desaulniers, Albert Ferland, Charles Gill, and later Alfred DesRochers, Claude-Henri Grignon, and Blanche Lamontagne-Beauregard (Lamontagne-Beauregard, Blanche)) who became the dominant group over the next 30 years. Their preference for local subject matter and language, as expressed in their magazine Le Terroir (founded 1909; “The Land”) and encouraged by the critic Camille Roy (Roy, Camille), complemented the French Canadian nationalism then being promulgated by Henri Bourassa (Bourassa, Henri) and Lionel-Adolphe Groulx (Groulx, Lionel-Adolphe). Paradoxically, the regionalists were proposing rural and agricultural themes when Quebec society was becoming urban and industrial. The French author Louis Hémon (Hémon, Louis)'s novel Maria Chapdelaine (1914; Eng. trans. Maria Chapdelaine), set in the rural Lac Saint-Jean region of Quebec, though grudgingly accepted by the Québécois at first, quickly became an important classic very much in tune with the predominant agriculturalist ideology. However, Quebec authors such as Rodolphe Girard (Marie Calumet [1904; Eng. trans. Marie Calumet]) and Albert Laberge (La Scouine [1918; Bitter Bread]), who portrayed country life too realistically, were censured and ostracized. The one poet who anticipated future trends, Jean-Aubert Loranger (Les Atmosphères [1920; "Atmospheres"]), was ignored.

World War II and the postwar period, 1935–60
      By the mid-1930s Canada's economic depression, Quebec's socioeconomic development, and European political events were making Quebec's regionalist literature obsolete.

      In fiction Jean-Charles Harvey attacked bourgeois ideology in Les Demi-Civilisés (1934; “The Half-Civilized”; Eng. trans. Sackcloth for Banner and Fear's Folly), which was condemned by the Roman Catholic Church, resulting in Harvey's being fired from his job at the journal Le Soleil. Three years later Félix-Antoine Savard (Savard, Félix-Antoine)'s Menaud, maître-draveur (Master of the River) deplored in lyrical language Anglo-American takeovers of Quebec's natural resources, and in 1938 Ringuet (Philippe Panneton (Ringuet)) traced the decline of Quebec's rural economy in Trente arpents (Thirty Acres). After the interruption of the war years (1939–45), French Canadian fiction became increasingly urban. Having moved to Quebec in 1939 after a stay in Europe, the Franco-Manitoban Gabrielle Roy (Roy, Gabrielle) drew a convincing portrait of working-class Montreal in Bonheur d'occasion (1945; The Tin Flute), for which she received the Prix Fémina. She also wrote much autobiographical fiction set in rural Manitoba. Roger Lemelin's Les Plouffe (1948; The Plouffe Family), a family chronicle set in the poorer quarters of Quebec city, spawned a popular television serial.

      Not all novelists were attracted to the social realism embodied by Roy's Bonheur d'occasion, however. Some, such as Robert Charbonneau (Charbonneau, Robert), André Giroux, and Robert Élie, wrote first-person introspective fiction influenced by Georges Bernanos (Bernanos, Georges), François Mauriac (Mauriac, François), and other Roman Catholic novelists of France. Others, such as Germaine Guèvremont (Guèvremont, Germaine) in Le Survenant and Marie-Didace (1945 and 1947; translated and published together as The Outlander), continued to examine rural society, though with greater detachment. One of the most prolific novelists, Yves Thériault (Thériault, Yves), found new subjects among Quebec's native peoples in Agaguk (1958; Eng. trans. Agaguk) and Ashini (1960; Eng. trans. Ashini).

      In poetry Hector de Saint-Denys Garneau (Garneau, Hector de Saint-Denys)'s unrhymed metaphysical poems (Regards et jeux dans l'espace [1937]; “Glances and Games in Space”) introduced a new era. Four poets subsequently dominated the 1940s and '50s: Garneau, Alain Grandbois (Grandbois, Alain), Anne Hébert (Hébert, Anne), and Rina Lasnier. Although each employed distinctive techniques and images, all expressed their sense of solitude, alienation, frustration, or despair. Each, especially Grandbois, influenced younger writers; for the first time, poets of Quebec, rather than poets of France, served as models for the next generation—the Hexagone poets.

      A literary group and publishing house, L'Hexagone (founded 1953) became a major force in Quebec poetry. It published dozens of elegantly printed volumes of verse, launched literary magazines such as Liberté (1959; “Liberty”), and organized annual conferences of Quebec and international writers. Its leading figures—Gaston Miron, Jacques Brault, Gilles Hénault, Fernand Ouellette, Jean-Guy Pilon, and Michel Van Schendel—were both theoreticians and practicing poets, writing interpretive essays as well as polished poems.

      Simultaneously, Quebec theatre assumed its modern form. A Montreal company, Les Compagnons de Saint-Laurent (1937–52), created a taste for professional performances of contemporary French plays. Two playwrights, Gratien Gélinas and Marcel Dubé, began writing in colloquial language about the problems of living in a society controlled by the Roman Catholic Church and by a paternalistic Union Nationale government. Permanent theatres and professional companies sprang up, their personnel often supported by part-time work with Radio-Canada or with the National Film Board of Canada.

      In 1948 the painter Paul-Émile Borduas (Borduas, Paul-Émile), one of the group of artists known as Les Automatistes, repudiated Quebec's Jansenist past in the revolutionary manifesto Refus global (1948; Total Refusal). Poet and playwright Claude Gauvreau, one of the signatories of the manifesto, transposed the group's principles to the written word, while poet and engraver Roland Giguère began writing poetry inspired by both Surrealism and Quebec nationalism. On the political front, in 1950 Pierre Elliott Trudeau (Trudeau, Pierre Elliott) and others founded Cité libre (“Free City”), a journal of social and political criticism. The “quiet revolution” was not far away.

The "Quiet Revolution"
      During the 1960s Quebec society underwent the greatest upheaval of its history. A new Liberal government set about modernizing the province, revamping the educational system, and creating a powerful Ministry of Cultural Affairs. Campaigns for the independence of Quebec were launched by separatist organizations that coalesced in the Parti Québécois (founded 1968), which became the provincial government in 1976. Intellectuals became vocal, and literary production more than tripled during the decade. A group of writers, including André Brochu, Paul Chamberland, and André Major, founded the magazine Parti pris (1963–68; “Position Taken”) and a publishing house of the same name to press their demands for a secular, socialist, and independent Quebec. The Parti pris writers politicized joual, the Quebec working-class dialect, by using it to express their alienation in works such as Major's short-story collection La Chair de poule (1965; “Goose Bumps”) and Jacques Renaud's novel Le Cassé (1964; Broke City, or Flat Broke and Beat). In 1968 the young playwright Michel Tremblay revolutionized Quebec theatre with Les Belles-Soeurs (“The Sisters-in-Law”; Eng. trans. Les Belles-Soeurs), which was first read at the Centre d'Essai des Auteurs Dramatiques (Centre for Dramatic Authors), established in 1965 to give a forum to Quebec playwrights. The “new Quebec theatre” ushered in by Tremblay was characterized by experimental approaches, including improvisation and collective creation; by proletarian language (Tremblay, Jean-Claude Germain, and Jean Barbeau); by parody (Robert Gurik, Hamlet, prince du Québec [1968; Hamlet, Prince of Quebec]); and by audience participation (Françoise Loranger, Double jeu [1969; “Double Game”]).

      In poetry the territory of Quebec (referred to as le pays) was rediscovered in Paul-Marie Lapointe's Choix de poèmes: arbres (1960; “Selection of Poems: Trees”) and Gatien Lapointe's Ode au Saint-Laurent (1963; “Ode to the St. Lawrence”). Nationalism adopted revolutionary language in Chamberland's Terre Québec (1964), and personal rebellion triumphed in the avant-garde magazines La Barre du jour (founded 1965) and Les Herbes rouges (founded 1968). A preoccupation with freedom of expression (la parole) revealed itself in titles such as Giguère's L'Âge de la parole (1965; “The Age of Speech”) and Yves Préfontaine's Pays sans parole (1967; “Speechless Country”). Perhaps the most influential collection was Miron's L'Homme rapaillé (1970; Embers and Earth: Selected Poems), a poetic record of the search for a Quebec identity. Michèle Lalonde's ironic "Speak White" condemned the Anglo-American economic exploitation embedded in the racist jeer “Speak white,” often hurled at Québécois who chose not to speak English; the poem was first recited at a 1968 show and again at the Montreal cultural event Nuit de la Poésie ("Night of Poetry") in 1970 and was published in 1974. With chansonniers (singer-songwriters) such as Gilles Vigneault, the “Quebec song” became the poetry of the people. Fusing elements of traditional Quebec folk music with politically charged lyrics, the Quebec song gained new importance at this time for its role in sustaining political fervour and national pride. Vigneault's music incorporated many elements of traditional Quebec folk music but was also influenced by contemporary French music.

      During the 1970s poetry was less political and more experimental: the concerns of American counterculture were adopted in the works of Lucien Francoeur and Raoul Duguay. Committed to the notion that there exists an essential harmony between music and poetry, Duguay founded the Infonie group and dedicated himself to the performance of his poetry (Or le cycle du sang dure donc [1967; “So the Cycle of the Blood Endures”]). Pierre Morency's poetry embraced a holistic vision of life that found its expression in a celebration of nature (Le Temps des oiseaux [1975; “The Time of the Birds”], Quand nous serons [1988; “When We Will Be”]). Michel Beaulieu (Pulsions [1973; “Urges”]) created a poetry of intimacy and desire rooted in everyday life. But as published poetry became more esoteric, the general public turned to chansonniers such as Robert Charlebois, whose American-influenced rock was just as concerned with Quebec identity as Vigneault's music.

      Since the 1970s, feminism (women's movement) has been a potent force in French Canadian literature. In contrast to their Anglophone peers, who took much of their inspiration from the social criticism of American feminists, Francophone feminists primarily turned to the literary theory of French critics. Important in the realm of theoretical explorations was the work of Nicole Brossard (L'Amer; ou, le chapitre effrité [1977; These Our Mothers; or, The Disintegrating Chapter] and Picture Theory [1982; Eng. trans. Picture Theory], both works of theory and fiction). With Le Désert mauve (1987; Mauve Desert), her feminist fiction was made more accessible to the general public. The gender assumptions embedded in the semantic and syntactic conventions of language as well as in the conventions of literary form were exposed in quite a number of works; of note in this endeavour was the work of Madeleine Gagnon (Lueur [1979; "Glimmer"]), France Théoret (Une Voix pour Odile [1978; "A Voice for Odile"]), and Yolande Villemaire (La Vie en prose [1980; “Life in Prose”]). In her utopian novel L'Euguélionne (1976; The Euguelion), Louky Bersianik (pseudonym of Lucile Durand) used the conventions of the fantastic to conjure up alternatives to the existing social structure and verbal discourse, and in Tryptique lesbien (1980; Lesbian Triptych), a mix of poetry, essays, and dramatic writing, Jovette Marchessault envisioned a society of women free from male domination.

      An important part of this polemical movement was the emergence of women's theatre, performed by groups such as the Théâtre Expérimental des Femmes and featuring controversial plays such as Denise Boucher's Les Fées ont soif (1978; The Fairies Are Thirsty) and Marchessault's La Saga des poules mouillées (1981; Saga of Wet Hens). Dramatist and novelist Marie Laberge continued the tradition of feminist theatre with, for example, C'était avant la guerre à l'Anse à Gilles (1981; "Before the War, Down at l'Anse à Gilles"), a historical drama centring on women's rights in the 1930s, and L'Homme gris (1986; "The Gray Man"; Eng. trans. Night), which explores the issues of spousal abuse, eating disorders, and incest.

The Quiet Revolution of French Canadian minorities
      Influenced in part by Quebec's Quiet Revolution, Francophone minorities outside Quebec began to experience a surge in literary production in the 1970s. This surge was aided by the 1969 federal policy that made French and English Canada's official languages, which fostered the development of publishing houses such as Les Editions d'Acadie in Moncton, N.B., Prise de Parole in Sudbury, Ont., and Les Editions du Blé in Saint Boniface, Man. New Brunswick novelist and playwright Antonine Maillet played an important role in the evolution of modern Acadian literature. Creator of the immortal Acadian charwoman La Sagouine in the play by the same name (1971; Eng. trans. La Sagouine; "The Slattern”) and recipient of the Prix Goncourt for Pélagie-la-charrette (1979; Pélagie: The Return to a Homeland), an epic novel about the fate of Acadians after the deportation of 1755, she created an awareness of Acadia and its history. Her novel Les Confessions de Jeanne de Valois (1992; “The Confessions of Jeanne de Valois”) reviews the 20th-century history of Francophone New Brunswick through the fictional autobiography of a teaching nun. Inclined to reject the more folkloric aspects of Maillet's writing, the new generation of Acadian writers includes poet and playwright Herménégilde Chiasson (Mourir à Scoudouc [1974; “To Die at Scoudouc”], Conversations [1998; Eng. trans. Conversations]) and postmodern novelist France Daigle. Acadian literature excels in lyric poetry, represented by authors who include Raymond Leblanc, Dyane Léger, and Serge Patrice Thibodeau.

      Franco-Ontarian culture underwent tremendous revitalization in the 1970s, particularly in northern Ontario with the development of regional theatre in French. André Paiement, one of the founders of the Théâtre du Nouvel-Ontario in the early 1970s, achieved popular success with his musical comedy Lavalléville (1975). Continuing the theatrical tradition into the 1980s and 1990s, both Jean Marc Dalpé (Le Chien [1987; “The Dog”]) and Michel Ouellette (French Town [1994]) won Canada's Governor General's Award for drama in French. Poet Patrice Desbiens explored the alienation of the Francophone minority in his bilingual poetry collection L'Homme invisible/The Invisible Man (1981). Novelist and short-story writer Daniel Poliquin has taken a more playful, satiric tone, most notably in his novel L'Ecureuil noir (1994; Black Squirrel) as well as his polemical essay Le Roman colonial (2000; In the Name of the Father: An Essay on Quebec Nationalism). Contemporary writers of western Canada include novelist Marguerite A. Primeau (Sauvage Sauvageon [1984; Savage Rose]), editor, poet, and novelist J.R. Léveillé (Une si simple passion [1997; “Such a Simple Passion”]), and poet Paul Savoie (A la façon d'un charpentier [1984; “In the Manner of a Carpenter”]). In 1993 Alberta-born author Nancy Huston (Huston, Nancy), who has lived much of her adult life in France, caused a considerable stir when her novel Cantique des plaines (1993), written first in English as Plainsong and then re-created in French, was awarded the Governor General's Award for fiction in French, raising questions about the very definition of French Canadian literature.

Contemporary trends
      The dominant genre in Quebec and French Canadian literature since the latter part of the 20th century has been the novel. In the 1960s, works of fiction reflected the turmoil of the Quiet Revolution in their radical, often sexual, themes and in their unconventional structures, derived in part from the French nouveau roman of the previous decade. The Quebec “ New Novel” began with Jacques Godbout's L'Aquarium (1962) and reached its high point in the brilliantly convoluted novels of Hubert Aquin that followed his Prochain épisode (1965; “Next Episode”; Eng. trans. Prochain Episode). Marie-Claire Blais (Blais, Marie-Claire)'s Une Saison dans la vie d'Emmanuel (1965; A Season in the Life of Emmanuel), which won the Prix Médicis, presented a scathing denunciation of Quebec rural life, and Godbout's Salut, Galarneau! (1967; Hail, Galarneau!) described the Americanization of Quebec. Blais went on to receive critical acclaim for Soifs (1995; These Festive Nights), while, 26 years and several novels after Salut, Galarneau!, Godbout produced the sequel Le Temps des Galarneau (1993; The Golden Galarneaus). Constantly renewing himself, Gérard Bessette moved from ironic realism in Le Libraire (1960; “The Bookseller”; Eng. trans. Not for Every Eye) through stream of consciousness in L'Incubation (1965; Incubation) to symbolic narrative in Les Anthropoïdes (1977; “The Anthropoids”) and semiautobiographical diary fiction in Les Dires d'Omer Marin (1985; “The Sayings of Omer Marin”). The poet Anne Hébert (Hébert, Anne) achieved success with her novel Kamouraska (1970; Eng. trans. Kamouraska), won the Prix Fémina for Les Fous de Bassan (1982; In the Shadow of the Wind), and won a Governor General's Award for L'Enfant chargé de songes (1992; Burden of Dreams), although the latter was less successful than her Le Premier jardin (1988; The First Garden). Louise Maheux-Forcier scandalized certain readers in 1963 with Amadou (Eng. trans. Amadou), a poetic novel about lesbian love. Réjean Ducharme in L'Avalée des avalés (1966; The Swallower Swallowed) and other novels presented the disenchantment of young people in the nuclear age. Other popular novelists of the later 20th century include Jacques Ferron, who poked fun at Quebec institutions, particularly in Le Ciel de Québec (1969; The Penniless Redeemer); the author and publisher Victor-Lévy Beaulieu, with his continuing saga of the Beauchemin family; Roch Carrier, who mocked biculturalism in La Guerre, Yes Sir! (1968; Eng. trans. La Guerre, Yes Sir!); and Jacques Poulin, whose early novels, set in the old city of Quebec, are comic visions of life (Mon cheval pour un royaume [1967], Jimmy [1969], and Le Coeur de la baleine bleue [1970]; translated into English under the title The Jimmy Trilogy). His novel Volkswagen Blues (1984; Eng. trans. Volkswagen Blues), although set mostly in the United States, is ultimately a quest for Quebec identity. In the 1980s the success of Yves Beauchemin's Le Matou (1981; The Alley Cat) and Arlette Cousture's historical novel Les Filles de Caleb (3 vol., 1985–2003; Emilie) suggested a return in favour of plot-driven narrative.

      The political tone of the novel had greatly diminished by the end of the 20th century. In contrast to the hard-edged contestation of the 1960s novel, Jacques Godbout's Une Histoire américaine (1986; An American Story) testifies to the discouragement of many Quebec intellectuals after the defeat in 1980 of the referendum on separation. The failure of various attempts to negotiate an understanding between Quebec and Canada after Quebec was the sole province not to ratify the Canadian constitution in 1982, as well as the narrow defeat in 1995 of a second referendum on sovereignty, took their toll. The relationship between personal and national identity is often explored through the irony of the postmodern novel, such as Madeleine Ouellette-Michalska's La Maison Trestler; ou, le 8e jour d'Amérique (1984; “The Trestler House; or, The Eighth Day of America”) and Acadian novelist France Daigle's 1953: Chronique d'une naissance annoncée (1995; 1953: Chronicle of a Birth Foretold), both of which combine fiction, biography, and metahistorical commentary. Contemporary fiction tends to favour the personal, hence the prominence of fictional autobiographies, autobiographical novels, and diary and epistolary fiction. Madeleine Monette's Le Double suspect (1980; Doubly Suspect), Anne Dandurand's Un Coeur qui craque (1990; The Cracks), and Jacques Brault's Agonie (1984; Death-Watch) all have elements of fictional diaries. Reworking Montesquieu's Persian Letters (1721), Lise Gauvin used in Lettres d'une autre (1984; Letters from an Other) a Persian narrator who comments naively and honestly on Quebec society. Michel Tremblay's early novels, such as La Grosse Femme d'à côté est enceinte (1978; The Fat Lady Next Door Is Pregnant), are set in the working-class neighbourhood of his youth. With La Nuit des Princes Charmants (1995; “The Night of the Princes Charming”; Eng. trans. Some Night My Prince Will Come), he gives a very candid account of the coming-of-age of a young homosexual. Sometimes referred to as Generation X writers, Louis Hamelin (La Rage [1989; “Rabies”]) and Christian Mistral (Vamp [1988]) began in the late 1980s to focus literary attention on the social concerns of their age.

      Another development in fiction has been the increasing prominence of the short story and novella, particularly with the establishment of the literary review XYZ and publishing house XYZ Éditeur in the 1980s. The short story lends itself to many literary themes: science fiction and the fantastic, with works such as Gaétan Brulotte's Kafkaesque Le Surveillant (1982; The Secret Voice), Jean-Pierre April's Chocs baroques (1991; “Baroque Shocks”), and Esther Rochon's Le Piège à souvenirs (1991; “The Memory Trap”); the erotic, with works such as Claire Dé's Le Désir comme catastrophe naturelle (1989; Desire as Natural Disaster) and Anne Dandurand's L'Assassin de l'intérieur/Diables d'espoir (1988; Deathly Delights); and the quirky realism of Monique Proulx's Les Aurores montréales (1996; Aurora Montrealis).

 Contemporary poetry has been marked by a return to lyricism with poets such as François Charron (Le Monde comme obstacle [1988; “The World as Obstacle”), whose themes range from politics to sexuality and spirituality. The emphasis on the personal is particularly poignant in the posthumous collection Autoportraits (1982; “Self-Portraits”) by Marie Uguay, stricken at a young age by cancer. Surrealism remains an important influence in Quebec poetry, particularly in the expression of eroticism, as, for example, in the poetry of Roger Des Roches (Le Coeur complet: poésie et prose, 1974–1982 [2000; “The Complete Heart: Poetry and Prose, 1974–1982”). Homosexual eroticism and the impact of AIDS are important themes in André Roy's poetry (L'Accélérateur d'intensité [1987; “Accelerator of Intensity”]). Other poets have tended to integrate poetry and narrative—for example, Denise Desautels in La Promeneuse et l'oiseau suivi de Journal de la Promeneuse (1980; “The Wanderer and the Bird Followed by Journal of the Wanderer”). Elise Turcotte published her poetry collection La Terre est ici (1989; “The Earth Is Here”) before creating the brief poetic novel Le Bruit des choses vivantes (1991; The Sound of Living Things). Similarly, Louise Dupré established her reputation as a poet before writing the well-received novel La Mémoria (1996; Memoria). Suzanne Jacob has excelled in poetry with La Part de feu (1997; “The Fire's Share”) and in fiction with the novel Laura Laur (1983). Although poetry no longer enjoys the influence it once did as a vehicle for the expression of collective identity, events such as the annual International Festival of Poetry in Trois-Rivières, Quebec, launched in 1985, attest to its vitality.

      The second half of the 20th century saw an impressive growth in Quebec theatre and dramatic writing, with several dozen original plays being performed each year. In Le Vrai Monde? (1987; The Real World?), perhaps his best play, Michel Tremblay explored the ambiguous relationship between life and its representation in art. His libretto for the opera Nelligan (1990) was a departure from his previous work: it studies Quebec through its most tragic voice, that of poet Émile Nelligan (Nelligan, Émile). Jean-Pierre Ronfard, one of the founders of the Nouveau Théâtre Expérimental, created a defining moment in Quebec theatre with La Vie et mort du roi boiteux (1981; “The Life and Death of the Lame King”), a six-play cycle whose performance in 1982 lasted more than 10 hours and treated its spectators to a parodic look at the works of Shakespeare and other great authors of the Western world. Since the 1990s, a younger generation of playwrights has often concerned itself with exploring marginalization, sexuality, and violence in society. Such writers include Normand Chaurette with Provincetown Playhouse, juillet 1919, j'avais 19 ans (1981; “Provincetown Playhouse, July 1919, I Was 19 Years Old”), René-Daniel Dubois with Being at Home with Claude (1986), and Michel Marc Bouchard with Les Feluettes; ou, la répétition d'un drame romantique (1987; Lilies; or, The Revival of a Romantic Drama). One of the most prominent members of this generation is playwright and filmmaker Robert Lepage, whose performance-based plays are influenced as much by modern technology as by Shakespeare and Japanese theatre: his productions include Les Plaques tectoniques (first performed 1988; “Tectonic Plates”), Elseneur (1995; “Elsinore”), and Les Sept Branches de la rivière Ota (first performed 1995; The Seven Streams of the River Ota), written with Eric Bernier.

David M. Hayne Kathleen Kellett-Betsos

The cosmopolitan culture of French Canada and Quebec
      As the example of Lepage illustrates, contemporary culture in French Canada reflects an increasing cosmopolitanism. Immigrant writers have added their voices to those of native-born writers. The Italo-Québécois poet and playwright Marco Micone startled the Quebec literary world when he responded to Michèle Lalonde's "Speak White" with his own poem "Speak What" (first published in 1989), calling for a more inclusive Quebec society and suggesting that immigrants have replaced the Québécois as the new exploited class. Other immigrant authors who have made their mark include: from Iraq, novelist and essayist Naïm Kattan (Adieu, Babylone [1975; Farewell, Babylon]); from Tunisia, Hédi Bouraoui (Bouraoui, Hédi) (Ainsi parle la Tour CN [1999; “Thus Spake the CN Tower”]); from China, novelist Ying Chen (L'Ingratitude [1995; Ingratitude]); from Haiti, novelist Dany Laferrière (Comment faire l'amour avec un nègre sans se fatiguer [1985; How to Make Love to a Negro]); from Brazil, novelist Sergio Kokis (Le Pavillon des miroirs [1994; Funhouse]); from Egypt, poet Anne-Marie Alonzo (Bleus de mine [1985; Lead Blues]); from Lebanon, playwright and novelist Abla Farhoud (Le Bonheur a la queue glissante [1998; “Happiness Has a Slippery Tail”]); and from France, novelist and theorist Régine Robin (La Québecoite [1993; The Wanderer]). Aboriginal writing has begun to emerge, although no other native author writing in French has achieved the acclaim accorded to Cree writer Bernard Assiniwi for his novel La Saga des Béothuks (1996; The Beothuk Saga), chronicling the tragic fate of the Beothuk Indians of Newfoundland. Quebec and French Canadian writers have come to examine the implications of cultural diversity; a notable example is Montreal novelist Francine Noël's Babel, prise deux; ou, nous avons tous découvert l'Amérique (1990; “Babel, Take Two; or, We All Discovered America”). Contemporary Canadian literature in French reflects heterogeneity in both its literary forms and its representation of an ethnically diverse society.

Kathleen Kellett-Betsos

Additional Reading

General works
Overviews of English and French Canadian literature may be found in William Toye (ed.), The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature (2001); W.H. New (ed.), Encyclopedia of Literature in Canada (2002); Eugene Benson and William Toye (eds.), The Oxford Companion to Canadian Theatre, 2nd ed. (1997); and W.H. New, A History of Canadian Literature (2001). Eva-Marie Kröller (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Canadian Literature (2004), is a useful introduction to major writers and genres. E.D. Blodgett, Five-Part Invention: A History of Literary History in Canada (2003), surveys the diversity of Canadian literatures and the issue of nationhood.Six volumes in the Dictionary of Literary Biography series, all ed. by W.H. New, include biobibliographic essays on individual writers: vol. 99, Canadian Writers Before 1890 (1990); vol. 92, Canadian Writers, 1890–1920 (1990); vol. 68, Canadian Writers, 1920–1959, First Series (1988); vol. 88, Canadian Writers, 1920–1959, Second Series (1989); vol. 53, Canadian Writers Since 1960, First Series (1986); and vol. 60, Canadian Writers Since 1960, Second Series (1987). Further bibliographic information is contained in Robert Lecker and Jack David (eds.), The Annotated Bibliography of Canada's Major Authors, 8 vol. (1979–94). The first volume (1996) of the series Contemporary Canadian Authors, ed. by Robert Lang, provides biobibliographic information about contemporary Canadian writers of fiction, poetry, and drama. Scholarly critical journals include Studies in Canadian Literature, Essays on Canadian Writing, and Canadian Literature.Kathy Mezei

Canadian literature in English
The essays in Literary History of Canada: Canadian Literature in English, 2nd ed., vol. 1–3, ed. by Carl F. Klinck (1976), and vol. 4, ed. by W.H. New (1990), are comprehensive critical studies, as are the volumes in the series Canadian Writers and Their Works, ed. by Robert Lecker, Jack David, and Ellen Quigley. Donna Bennett and Russell Brown (eds.), A New Anthology of Canadian Literature (2002); and Gary Geddes (ed.), 15 Canadian Poets × 3 (2001), are important anthologies. Useful bibliographies include Reginald Eyre Watters, A Checklist of Canadian Literature and Background Materials, 1628–1960, 2nd ed., rev. and enlarged (1972); Peter Stevens, Modern English-Canadian Poetry: A Guide to Information Sources (1978); Helen Hoy (ed.), Modern English-Canadian Prose: A Guide to Information Sources (1983); and Jane McQuarrie, Anne Mercer, and Gordon Ripley (eds.), Index to Canadian Poetry in English (1984). The literature of Canada's First Nations is surveyed in Thomas King (ed.), All My Relations: An Anthology of Contemporary Canadian Native Fiction (1992); Daniel David Moses and Terry Goldie (eds.), An Anthology of Canadian Native Literature in English, 3rd ed. (2005); W.H. New (ed.), Native Writers and Canadian Writing (1990); and Jeannette C. Armstrong and Lally Grauer (eds.), Native Poetry in Canada: A Contemporary Anthology (2001). For drama, Jerry Wasserman (ed.), Modern Canadian Plays, 4th ed., 2 vol. (2000–01); Don Rubin (ed.), Canadian Theatre History, 2nd ed. (2004); and John Ball and Richard Plant (eds.), Bibliography of Theatre History in Canada: The Beginnings to 1984 (1993), are helpful guides.Kathy Mezei

Canadian literature in French
Jonathan Weiss and Jane Moss, French-Canadian Literature (1996), is a concise but useful survey. Studies on the novel include Ben-Z. Shek, French-Canadian & Québécois Novels (1991); and Maurice Cagnon, The French Novel of Quebec (1986). André G. Bourassa, Surrealism and Quebec Literature: History of a Cultural Revolution, trans. from the French by Mark Czarnecki (1984), is a well-documented work, particularly helpful for its study of Quebec poetry before the 1980s. Jean-Louis Major, Quebec Literature: From Collective Identity to Modernity and Back (1999), is a brief but insightful study. Jonathan M. Weiss, French-Canadian Theater (1986), offers a useful overview. François Paré, Exiguity: Reflections on the Margins of Literature, trans. from the French by Lin Burman (1997), studies Québécois and French Canadian writing as minority literatures. Hans R. Runte, Writing Acadia: The Emergence of Acadian Literature, 1970–1990 (1997), is a general introduction to modern Acadian literature. Patricia Smart, Writing in the Father's House: The Emergence of the Feminine in the Quebec Literary Tradition, trans. from the French (1991); and Mary Jean Green, Women and Narrative Identity: Rewriting the Quebec National Text (2001), focus on women's writing in Quebec. Susan Ireland and Patrice J. Proulx (eds.), Textualizing the Immigrant Experience in Contemporary Quebec (2004), is a collection of articles on the postwar literature of immigration in Quebec from a variety of critical perspectives. Donald Smith, Voices of Deliverance, trans. from the French (1986), presents interviews with contemporary Quebec and Acadian authors.Anthologies focusing on specific literary genres include L.E. Doucette (ed.), The Drama of Our Past: Major Plays from Nineteenth-Century Quebec (1997), which situates the plays in their historical context; Robert Wallace (ed.), Quebec Voices (1986), which translates three works by contemporary playwrights; Matt Cohen and Wayne Grady (eds.), The Quebec Anthology 1830–1990 (1996), a collection of short stories; Louise Blouin, Bernard Pozier, and D.G. Jones, Esprit de corps: Québec Poetry of the Late Twentieth Century in Translation (1997); and Fred Cogswell and Jo-Anne Elder (eds. and trans.), Unfinished Dreams: Contemporary Poetry of Acadie (1990).David M. Hayne Kathleen Kellett-Betsos

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