The Cambridge Companion to Canadian Literature This fully revised second edition of The Cambridge Companion to Canadian Literature offers a comprehensive introduction to major writers, genres, and topics. For this edition several chapters have been completely re-written to reflect major developments in Canadian literature since 2004. Surveys of fiction, drama, and poetry are complemented by chapters on Aboriginal writing, autobiography, literary criticism, writing by women, and the emergence of urban writing. Areas of research that have expanded since the first edition include environmental concerns and questions of sexuality which are freshly explored across several different chapters. A substantial chapter on francophone writing is included. Authors such as Margaret Atwood, noted for her experiments in multiple literary genres, are given full consideration, as is the work of authors who have achieved major recognition, such as Alice Munro, recipient of the Nobel Prize for literature. Eva-Marie Kröller edited the Cambridge Companion to Canadian Literature (first edn., 2004) and, with Coral Ann Howells, the Cambridge History of Canadian Literature (2009). She has published widely on travel writing and cultural semiotics, and won a Killam Research Prize as well as the Distinguished Editor Award of the Council of Editors of Learned Journals for her work as editor of the journal Canadian Literature, 1995–2003. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.

THE CAMBRIDGE COMPANION TO

CANADIAN LITERATURE SECOND EDITION

EDITED BY

EVA-MARIE KRÖLLER University of British Columbia, Vancouver

University Printing House, Cambridge cb2 8bs, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, ny 10006, usa 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, vic 3207, Australia 314-321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi - 110025, India 79 Anson Road, #06-04/06, Singapore 079906 Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781316612408 © Cambridge University Press 2004, 2017 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2004 Reprinted 2005 Second edition 2017 A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library isbn 978-1-107-15962-4 Hardback isbn 978-1-316-61240-8 Paperback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Dedicated to the memory of Penny van Toorn

CONTENTS

List of Plates List of Maps Notes on Contributors Acknowledgments Note on Poetry Chronology

page ix x xi xv xvi xviii

Introduction eva-marie kröller

1

1 Aboriginal Writing penny van toorn and daniel justice

26

2 Francophone Writing e. d. blodgett

59

3 Exploration and Travel eva-marie kröller

82

4 Nature-writing christoph irmscher

107

5 Drama ric knowles and jessica riley

128

6 Poetry david staines

150

7 Fiction ˇ marta dvo rák

173

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8 Short Fiction robert thacker

197

9 Writing by Women coral ann howells

217

10 Life Writing julie rak

239

11 Regionalism and Urbanism janice fiamengo

261

12 Canadian Criticism in English: Literature and Nation shelley hulan

283

Further Reading Index

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300 311

PLATES

1 Samuel Hearne, “A Winter View in the Athapuscow Lake,” from Hearne, Journey from Prince of Wales’s Fort (1795). Courtesy of Houghton Library, Harvard University.

page 110

2 “A Camp on the Boundary Line,” frontispiece to vol. II of John Keast Lord, The Naturalist in Vancouver Island and British Columbia (1866). Author’s collection. Photograph: Tim Ford.

112

3 Agnes Fitzgibbon, Plate VI, facing p. 48, in Catharine Parr Traill, Canadian Wild Flowers (1868). Courtesy of the Canadian Museum of Nature.

115

4 From Delos White Beadle, Canadian Fruit, Flower, and Kitchen Gardener (1872). Author’s collection. Photograph: Tim Ford.

117

5 “E. E. T.” (Ernest E. Thompson [Seton]), Wood Ducks, from Thomas McIlwraith, Birds of Ontario, 2nd edn. (1894). Author’s collection. Photograph: Tim Ford.

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6 Illustration by Alistair Anderson, from River of the Angry Moon by Mark Hume with Harvey Thommasen. Copyright  C 1998 by Mark Hume. Published in Canada by Greystone Books, a division of Douglas and McIntyre. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

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MAPS

1 Canada 2 Tribal distributions in and near Canada at time of contact

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page xlii 27

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

e. d. blodgett is University Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at the University of Alberta and past poet laureate of Edmonton (2007–2009). He has published widely on comparative Canadian literature. He received the 1996 Governor General’s Award and the 1997 Canadian Authors’ Association Award for Apostrophes, a volume of poetry. A renga with Jacques Brault entitled Transfiguration (1998) also received the Governor General’s Award. Publications include Five-Part Invention: A History of Literary History in Canada (2003) and Les Enfants des Jésuites ou le sacrifice des vierges (2013). ˇ marta dvo rák, born in Budapest and raised in Canada, was Professor of Canadian and Commonwealth Literatures at the Sorbonne Nouvelle. Privileging issues of global circulation via rhetoric and narratology, her most recent books include Tropes and Territories (with William H. New, 2007), Crosstalk (with Diana Brydon, 2012), and Translocated Modernisms (with Dean Irvine and Emily Ballantyne, 2016). She is currently writing a book on Mavis Gallant. janice fiamengo teaches in the Department of English at the University of Ottawa. Her publications include The Woman’s Page: Journalism and Rhetoric in Early Canada (2008) and the edited volumes Other Selves: Animals in the Canadian Literary Imagination (2007) and Home Ground and Foreign Territory: Essays on Early Canadian Literature (2014). coral ann howells, Professor Emerita at the University of Reading, is now Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of English Studies, University of London. She has published widely on contemporary Canadian writers, including Margaret Atwood and Alice Munro. Editor of the Cambridge Companion to Margaret Atwood (2006) and co-editor with Eva-Marie Kröller of the Cambridge History of Canadian Literature (2009), she has also co-edited volume 12 of the Oxford History of the Novel in English xi

notes on contributors

(2017) with Paul Sharrad and Gerry Turcotte. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. shelley hulan teaches in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Waterloo. Her articles on nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Canadian poetry and fiction have appeared in journals such as Canadian Poetry: Studies, Documents, Reviews, Essays on Canadian Writing, and the Journal of Canadian Studies. Her research includes the connections between rhetoric, memory, and history in the work of Confederation-era writers such as Sara Jeannette Duncan, Susan Frances Harrison, E. Pauline Johnson/Tekahionwake (Mohawk), and Archibald Lampman. christoph irmscher teaches at Indiana University Bloomington, where he is Provost Professor of English and the George F. Getz Jr. Professor in the Wells Scholars Program, which he also directs. His books include The Poetics of Natural History (1999; Language and Literature Award of the Association of American Publishers, Scholarly Division; American Studies Network Prize), Longfellow Redux (2008), Louis Agassiz: Creator of American Science (2013), and Max Eastman: A Life (2017). He is the editor of the Library of America edition of John James Audubon’s Writings and Drawings (1999). daniel justice is a Colorado-born Canadian citizen of the Cherokee Nation. He works on Musqueam territory at the University of British Columbia, where he is Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Literature and Expressive Culture and Professor of First Nations and Indigenous Studies and English. His publications include Our Fire Survives the Storm: A Cherokee Literary History (2006) and Badger (2015), and, with James H. Cox, he has edited the Oxford Handbook of Indigenous American Literature (2014). ric knowles is Professor of Drama at the University of Guelph, and former editor of Modern Drama, Canadian Theatre Review, and Theatre Journal. Among his authored books are The Theatre of Form and the Production of Meaning (1999), Reading the Material Theatre (2004), Theatre & Interculturalism (2010), How Theatre Means (2014), and Performing the Intercultural City (2017). eva-marie kröller, who teaches in the Department of English at the University of British Columbia, edited the Cambridge Companion to Canadian Literature (first edn., 2004) and, with Coral Ann Howells, the Cambridge History of Canadian Literature (2009). She has published widely on travel writing and cultural semiotics, and is completing a study of life writing and

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notes on contributors

imperial networks. Her awards include a Killam Research Prize, as well as the Distinguished Editor Award of the Council of Editors of Learned Journals for her work as editor of the journal Canadian Literature, 1995–2003. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. julie rak is a Professor in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta. She is the author of Negotiated Memory: Doukhobor Autobiographical Discourse (2004) and Boom! Manufacturing Memoir for the Popular Market (2013). She edited Auto/biography in Canada: Critical Directions (2005) and has published extensively in the areas of lifewriting studies, Canadian literature and North American popular culture. jessica riley received her PhD from the School of English and Theatre Studies, University of Guelph. Her work has been published in Canadian Theatre Review, in Latina/o Canadian Theatre and Performance (2013), and in OuterSpeares: Shakespeare, Intermedia, and the Limits of Adaptation (2014). Jessica is also the editor of A Man of Letters: The Selected Dramaturgical Correspondence of Urjo Kareda (2017, Heather McCallum Award from the Canadian Association for Theatre Research). david staines is Professor of English at the University of Ottawa. He is the editor of the Journal of Canadian Poetry and of the New Canadian Library. His books include The Canadian Imagination: Dimensions of a Literary Culture (1977), The Forty-Ninth and Other Parallels: Contemporary Canadian Perspectives (1986), Beyond the Provinces: Literary Canada at Century’s End (1995), The Letters of Stephen Leacock (2006), and The Cambridge Companion to Alice Munro (2016). A history of Canadian fiction is in preparation. In 1998, he received the Lorne Pierce Medal for distinguished service to Canadian literature from the Royal Society of Canada, and in 2011 he was awarded both the Order of Canada and the Order of Ontario. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. robert thacker is Charles A. Dana Professor of Canadian Studies and English at St. Lawrence University. His books include The Great Prairie Fact and Literary Imagination (1989), Alice Munro: Writing Her Lives: A Biography (2005; revised 2011), and Reading Alice Munro, 1973–2013 (2016), and he has edited a collection of critical essays, Alice Munro: Hateship, Friendship, Loveship, Courtship, Marriage, Runaway, and Dear Life (2016). penny van toorn was a lecturer in Australian Literature and Australian Studies at the University of Sydney. Her books include Rudy Wiebe and the Historicity of the Word (1995) and Writing Never Arrives Naked: Early

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notes on contributors

Aboriginal Cultures of Writing in Australia (2006). She co-edited Speaking Positions: Aboriginality, Gender and Ethnicity in Australian Cultural Studies (1995) and Stories without End (2002). She published extensively on postcolonial literatures and theory, focusing particularly on writings by and about Indigenous peoples of Australia and Canada.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My thanks to the contributors for their professionalism and collegiality, to Dominique Yupangco for expert technical assistance, to André Lamontagne and Allan Smith for bibliographical advice, to the press readers for their careful attention to the proposal for this volume, to Nick Brock for expert copy-editing, and, as always, to Sarah Stanton at Cambridge University Press for her efficiency and wisdom. Margaret Atwood, “Progressive Insanities of a Pioneer,” reprinted by permission of the author. George Bowering, “For WCW,” reprinted by permission of the author. Robert Kroetsch, “Stone Hammer Poem,” reprinted by permission of the University of Alberta Press. Al Purdy, “The Country North of Belleville,” reprinted by permission of Harbour Publishing.

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