| As with the other surveys in this series, this account of the development of English-Canadian literature is meant as an introduction, and a brief introduction at that. In time, students and teachers, as well, may become sufficiently read in Canadian letters that they can look back on this effort and wonder at the absence of reference to so many writers. So many bright, able, productive writers are never mentioned. Mea culpa, but the point is that the prospectus from which this and the other Papers have derived requires brevity of format, a thoughtful survey. |
| Another feature that should be explained are the approaches to the development of this particular literature: historical, thematic, and aesthetic, although the first two are rather dominant. |
| The history of English-Canadian literature encompasses several hundred years of search and discovery by writers, and their record, also, of the experience of Canada perceived through the imagination. This history is also about the taking up of a craft so that this imagining is given form. One thesis offered throughout is that these writers passed through a phase wherein they were content to adapt tried and true manners of expression that had sustained their forebears in Britain and Europe. And another thesis is that they gradually came to terms with the validity of the experience of Canada as a subject across which their imaginations worked and then shaped. After all, the process of adaptation diminished as the coming to terms passed so that, in our time, self-reliance is taken for granted. Experiment and invention are taken for granted. One should write out of one's own point of view, in whatever form one finds appropriate. |
| What is English-Canadian about English-Canadian literature? For one thing, the literature is written in English, which is to say, it is imagined in English. It is not imagined and written in French, the other language of Canada. The French-Canadian writer has had a different experience in Canada, longer than the English-Canadian, one hastens to add, and a different culture. The legend on the Quebec license is "Je me souviens." I remember. The task of this memory has not always been easy, but a sure virtue of French-Canadian literature in our time is the capacity of those writers to remember. |
| English-Canadian writers came to their vocation in the old days remembering that they had come from the United Kingdom, and it took quite a while for them to believe that it was to their benefit to be Canadians. |
| Finally, let's agree that American writers have had some of these same problems. Ernest Hemingway thought that The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was a singularly American novel, maybe the first, because Huck spoke in American English, not English English. A lot of American writers who had come and gone labored, often with brilliance, but labored in English English, and so, maybe in |
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