Wikipedia Deep Dive

Canadian literature

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In 1849, an angry mob set fire to the Canadian parliament building in Montreal. Thousands of French Canadian books burned that night, along with a few hundred English volumes. The blaze was so devastating that for over a century, scholars assumed Quebec had produced virtually no literature before the 1820s. They were wrong—but the fire had done its work, erasing the evidence of an earlier literary culture from collective memory.

This destruction and resurrection tells you something essential about Canadian literature: it has always been shaped by struggle, survival, and the tension between forgetting and remembering.

Two Literatures, One Country

Canada is unusual among nations in having not one but two distinct literary traditions, each rooted in a different European parent. French Canadian literature draws from the traditions of France, while English Canadian literature looks to Britain. These aren't just linguistic differences—they represent fundamentally different ways of seeing the country, different concerns, different histories.

The earliest Canadian writing wasn't really "literature" in the artistic sense at all. It was practical: travel accounts, exploration narratives, records of what Europeans found when they arrived in this vast, cold, often bewildering land. But from these pragmatic beginnings, three great themes emerged that would dominate Canadian writing for centuries: nature, frontier life, and Canada's uncertain position in the world.

Literary critics have a term for the psychological state these themes reflect: the garrison mentality. Imagine yourself as an early settler, huddled with others in a small fortified community, surrounded by endless wilderness. Outside the walls, nature isn't pastoral or romantic—it's threatening, indifferent, capable of killing you. This defensive crouch, this sense of civilization as a fragile outpost, permeated early Canadian literature and left traces that persist today.

The French Canadian Story

After the fire of 1849 destroyed that early evidence, French Canadian literature had to essentially rebuild itself. What sparked this rebuilding wasn't literary ambition but political passion—the rise of Quebec patriotism and the Lower Canada Rebellion of 1837. Combined with the spread of primary school education, these forces created both writers and readers where few had existed before.

The first French Canadian novel is generally considered to be L'influence d'un livre by Philippe-Ignace-François Aubert de Gaspé. (The title translates to "The Influence of a Book"—a fitting name for a work that would influence so many books to come.) Two genres quickly became popular: rural novels celebrating country life, and historical novels looking back to Quebec's past. French authors, particularly Honoré de Balzac with his panoramic social novels, provided the models.

But here's where things get interesting—and restrictive.

In 1866, Father Henri-Raymond Casgrain became one of Quebec's first literary theorists. His argument was simple and absolute: literature's purpose was to project proper Catholic morality. Full stop. This wasn't just one priest's opinion; it reflected the Catholic Church's enormous influence over Quebec society, an influence that would shape—and constrain—French Canadian writing for decades.

Some writers rebelled. Louis-Honoré Fréchette and Arthur Buies broke conventions to write more interesting, less doctrinaire work. But they were exceptions. The pattern of literature-as-moral-instruction continued until the 1930s, when a new generation educated at Université Laval and Université de Montréal began writing novels with psychological and sociological foundations rather than catechetical ones.

Two writers from this period achieved something unprecedented: international recognition. Gabrielle Roy and Anne Hébert proved that French Canadian literature could speak beyond provincial borders. Quebec theatre, previously stuck in a rut of melodramas and light comedies, became more ambitious and serious.

The Quiet Revolution Wasn't Quiet in Literature

The real explosion came with what Quebecers call the Quiet Revolution—the social, cultural, and political upheaval of the 1960s that transformed Quebec from a conservative, church-dominated society into a modern, secular one. French Canadian literature didn't just expand; it detonated.

The turmoil had been building since World War II and accelerated with industrialization in the 1950s. But the 1960s brought a confidence and experimentalism that attracted global attention. In 1979, Acadian novelist Antonine Maillet won the Prix Goncourt, France's most prestigious literary award—a remarkable achievement for a writer from a small French-speaking community in New Brunswick, far from the literary centers of Paris or even Montreal.

Experimental writers pushed boundaries. Poet Nicole Brossard wrote in a formalist style, more interested in how language works than in telling conventional stories. The same year Maillet won her Goncourt, Roch Carrier published The Hockey Sweater, a children's story that captured the cultural tensions between English and French Canada with devastating simplicity. A young French Canadian boy is mortified when his mother accidentally orders him a Toronto Maple Leafs sweater instead of a Montreal Canadiens jersey. It's funny, it's sad, and it cuts to something real about what it means to be caught between two solitudes in a single country.

English Canada Finds Its Voice

The question of when English Canadian literature actually begins is surprisingly contentious. Since Canada only became an official country on July 1, 1867—when several British colonies unified into a single nation—some argue that anything written before this date was colonial literature, not Canadian literature. It's a distinction that matters more to academics than to readers, but it points to a genuine uncertainty about Canadian identity that runs through much of the country's writing.

The book most often cited as the first Canadian novel is The History of Emily Montague by Frances Brooke, published in 1769. Brooke wrote it in Sillery, Quebec, after the British conquest of New France—so even this founding text emerges from the collision of two cultures.

More influential were two English sisters who immigrated to Upper Canada in 1832: Susanna Moodie and Catharine Parr Traill. They recorded their experiences as pioneers in books that still resonate today. Parr Traill wrote The Backwoods of Canada and Canadian Crusoes; Moodie produced Roughing It in the Bush and Life in the Clearings.

What makes these books so important isn't just their historical value—it's their themes. Survival in harsh conditions. The struggle against an indifferent environment. The challenge of making a life in a land that doesn't care whether you live or die. These concerns would echo through Canadian literature for the next century and a half, most famously in Margaret Atwood's critical study Survival, which argued that the drive to survive is the defining characteristic of Canadian writing.

Here's a telling detail: the Moodie and Parr Traill sisters had another sister, Agnes Strickland, who stayed in England. While Susanna and Catharine wrote about frozen winters and crop failures and isolation, Agnes wrote elegant royal biographies. The contrast captures something essential about how leaving England for Canada changed not just circumstances but imagination itself.

The Confederation Poets and the Comedy King

In the 1880s and 1890s, a group of poets emerged who would later be called the Confederation Poets—not because they wrote about confederation, but because they were the first generation to come of age after Canada became a country. Charles G.D. Roberts, Archibald Lampman, Bliss Carman, Duncan Campbell Scott, and William Wilfred Campbell all chose nature as their primary subject, drawing from their own experiences in their own voices rather than imitating British models.

During this same period, two poets achieved popular success by focusing on Canada's two founding cultures. E. Pauline Johnson drew on her part-Mohawk heritage—she was one of the first Indigenous writers to reach a mainstream audience. William Henry Drummond became known as the "Poet of the Habitant," writing dialect verse that captured (or caricatured, depending on your view) French Canadian rural life.

But for sheer reach, nobody matched Stephen Leacock. Between 1915 and 1925, Leacock was the best-selling humor writer in the English-speaking world—not just in Canada, but globally. His best-known book, Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town, published in 1912, affectionately satirizes small-town Ontario life. The town of Mariposa that Leacock invented has become a Canadian archetype, a place that every Canadian recognizes even if it never quite existed.

Anne of Green Gables and the Power of Place

In 1908, Lucy Maud Montgomery published Anne of Green Gables, a novel about a red-haired orphan girl sent to live on a farm in Prince Edward Island. It has sold an estimated fifty million copies, making it one of the best-selling books in history. Not best-selling Canadian books—best-selling books, period.

Montgomery tapped into something universal through something specific. Anne Shirley's imagination, her loneliness, her desperate desire to belong—these resonate across cultures. But the novel is also deeply rooted in place. Prince Edward Island becomes almost a character itself, its red soil and green fields and ocean vistas shaping who Anne becomes. The book sparked a tourism industry that persists today; visitors from around the world, particularly Japan, come to PEI to walk where Anne walked, even though Anne never actually existed.

This phenomenon—literature creating place as much as reflecting it—would recur throughout Canadian writing. The Maritime literary revival of the 1920s, centered on Nova Scotia, celebrated Atlantic Canadian folklore and song, expressing what one historian called a romantic vision of "the hardiness, simplicity, and virtues of the seafaring life." The past was being invented even as it was being recorded.

After the Wars

World War II changed Canadian literature, as it changed everything else. Three novelists emerged as dominant figures in the postwar decades: Hugh MacLennan, W.O. Mitchell, and Morley Callaghan.

MacLennan's Two Solitudes, published in 1945, gave Canadian discourse one of its most enduring phrases. The title refers to the gulf between English and French Canada—two peoples sharing a country but living in separate worlds, unable or unwilling to truly understand each other. It's a cliché now, but clichés become clichés because they capture something true.

Meanwhile, a different kind of Canadian novel was brewing. In 1966, Leonard Cohen—yes, the same Leonard Cohen who would become one of the most influential singer-songwriters of his generation—published Beautiful Losers. One reviewer called it "the most revolting book ever written in Canada." The novel was experimental, sexually explicit, spiritually searching, and absolutely nothing like the wilderness survival stories or gentle small-town satires that had defined Canadian fiction.

Cohen didn't care about the garrison mentality. He didn't care about survival in the bush. He cared about saints and sex and the weird mysticism of modern life. In time, Beautiful Losers came to be considered a Canadian classic—proof that Canadian literature could be as transgressive and cosmopolitan as any other.

The Modernists Arrive (Late)

Modernism—the literary movement that had transformed European and American writing in the 1920s—took longer to reach Canada. Writers like Mavis Gallant, Mordecai Richler, Norman Levine, Margaret Laurence, and Irving Layton brought modernist techniques and sensibilities to Canadian writing, building on earlier work by F.R. Scott and A.J.M. Smith.

The reception was sometimes hostile. Norman Levine's Canada Made Me, a 1958 travelogue that presented a sour, unromantic interpretation of the country, was widely rejected. Canadians, it seemed, wanted their literature to be proud of them, or at least polite. Levine was neither.

But after 1967—Canada's centennial year—everything accelerated. The national government increased funding to publishers. Small presses proliferated across the country. A new generation of writers emerged who felt less need to justify Canadian literature's existence and more freedom to simply write.

The World Notices

Consider how strange this trajectory is: in the 1940s, when academic Clara Thomas decided to concentrate on Canadian literature for her master's thesis, the idea was so novel and radical that word reached The Globe and Mail's books editor, William Arthur Deacon. He personally contacted Thomas to offer the newspaper's resources in support. Studying Canadian literature was considered eccentric, almost quixotic—as if one were to specialize in the literature of, say, Nebraska.

By the 1990s and 2000s, Canadian writers were winning the world's most prestigious prizes with remarkable frequency.

Michael Ondaatje won the Booker Prize in 1992 for The English Patient, a novel that would become an Academy Award-winning film. Margaret Atwood won the Booker twice—for The Blind Assassin in 2000 and The Testaments in 2019. Yann Martel's Life of Pi took the prize in 2002. Carol Shields won both the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award for The Stone Diaries. Lawrence Hill's Book of Negroes won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize.

And then, in 2013, Alice Munro became the first Canadian to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Munro specialized in short stories—a form often considered lesser than the novel. She set almost all her work in southwestern Ontario, in small towns much like the one where she grew up. Her territory was domestic: marriages, affairs, family secrets, the way the past haunts the present. Nothing flashy. Nothing experimental. Just precise, devastating observation of ordinary lives.

The Nobel committee called her "the master of the contemporary short story." Critics had been saying something similar for years: that she was simply the best living writer of short fiction in English. Not Canadian short fiction. Short fiction, period.

Indigenous Literature: No Such Thing?

Here's a statement that might seem paradoxical: there is no such thing as Indigenous literature in Canada.

That's the view of writer Jeannette Armstrong, and her reasoning is important. Indigenous peoples of Canada are culturally diverse—hundreds of distinct nations with their own languages, traditions, and stories. "I would stay away from the idea of 'Native' literature," Armstrong has said. "There is no such thing. There is Mohawk literature, there is Okanagan literature, but there is no generic Native in Canada."

Lumping all Indigenous writing together under one label obscures more than it reveals. A Mohawk writer from Ontario and an Okanagan writer from British Columbia share the experience of being Indigenous in a settler-colonial country, but their literary traditions are as different as Greek and Norse mythology.

This insight applies beyond Indigenous writing. Canadian literature itself might be a convenient fiction—a category that contains multitudes, from Acadian novels to Vancouver experimental poetry to Prairie realism to Montreal Jewish humor. The garrison walls, it turns out, enclosed not one culture but many.

The Infrastructure of Literature

Literature doesn't happen by accident. It requires infrastructure: publishers willing to take risks, grants to support writers during the years it takes to complete a book, prizes to confer recognition and boost sales, critics to sort the significant from the forgettable.

Canadian literature benefits from substantial governmental support. The Canada Council for the Arts and various provincial grant programs fund the creation, publication, and promotion of works by Canadian authors. This isn't unique to Canada—most countries support their literary cultures in some way—but it's particularly important in a country with a relatively small population next to the cultural behemoth of the United States.

The prize ecosystem matters too. The Governor General's Literary Awards, established in 1936, honor the best books in both English and French. The Scotiabank Giller Prize, founded in 1994, has become perhaps the most prestigious English-language fiction prize in Canada. There are awards specifically for Indigenous writing, for children's literature, for poetry.

This infrastructure creates a space where Canadian literature can exist as something other than a minor tributary of American or British writing. Whether that space is sufficient, whether it encourages risk-taking or safe choices, whether prizes distort as much as they reward—these are ongoing debates. But the infrastructure exists, and Canadian writing continues to emerge from it.

What Canadian Literature Is About Now

The old themes haven't disappeared. Nature still figures prominently. The tension between wilderness and civilization persists. The question of Canadian identity—what makes Canadian writing Canadian rather than something else—continues to preoccupy critics and writers alike.

But twenty-first century Canadian literature has expanded far beyond the garrison mentality. Writers now address female and LGBTQ rights, immigrant experiences, environmental crises, the complicated relationship between settlers and Indigenous peoples, and the evolving meaning of Canadian values in a globalized world.

The survival that Margaret Atwood identified as central to Canadian literature looks different now. It's less about surviving winter and more about surviving history—the history of colonization, of cultural erasure, of being caught between empires and identities. The garrison walls have fallen, but new structures of meaning are still being built.

What remains consistent is the productive tension between the local and the universal. The best Canadian writing—like the best writing from anywhere—finds the universal in the particular. A red-haired orphan on a Prince Edward Island farm. A hockey sweater in the wrong colors. Small-town Ontario illuminated by precise attention. Stories set in a specific place that speak to readers everywhere.

That 1849 fire in Montreal destroyed thousands of books but couldn't destroy Canadian literature. What burned has been rebuilt many times over, in two languages and countless voices, from a country still figuring out what it is and what it has to say.