ABSTRACT

The Routledge Concise History of Canadian Literature introduces the fiction, poetry and drama of Canada in its historical, political and cultural contexts.

In this clear and structured volume, Richard Lane outlines:

  • the history of Canadian literature from colonial times to the present
  • key texts for Canadian First Peoples and the literature of Quebec
  • the impact of English translation, and the Canadian immigrant experience
  • critical themes such as landscape, ethnicity, orality, textuality, war and nationhood
  • contemporary debate on the canon, feminism, postcoloniality, queer theory, and cultural and ethnic diversity
  • the work of canonical and lesser-known writers from Catherine Parr Traill and Susanna Moodie to Robert Service, Maria Campbell and Douglas Coupland.

Written in an engaging and accessible style and offering a glossary, maps and further reading sections, this guidebook is a crucial resource for students working in the field of Canadian Literature.

chapter 1|20 pages

Introduction

First Peoples and the Colonial Narratives of Canadian Literature

chapter 2|17 pages

Literatures of Landscape and Encounter

Canadian Romanticism and Pastoral Writing

chapter 3|35 pages

A New Nation

Prose fiction and the Rise of the Canadian Novel During the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

chapter 4|21 pages

In Flanders Fields

Gender and social transformation in the First and Second World Wars

chapter 5|31 pages

Canadian Modernism, 1914–60

“A Journey Across Canada”

chapter 6|35 pages

Feminist Literatures

New Poetics of Identities and Sexualities from the 1960s to the Twenty-First Century

chapter 7|20 pages

Contemporary Indigenous Literatures

Narratives of Autonomy and Resistance

chapter 8|21 pages

Canadian Postmodernism

Genre Trouble and New Media in Contemporary Canadian Writing

chapter 9|10 pages

Concluding with the Postcolonial Imagination

Diversity, Difference and Ethnicity