Canadian literature has often had to deal with such differences in attitude, not just because many Canadian authors were born elsewhere and brought outsiders’ expectations with them, but also because popular attitudes often perpetuated stereotypes of Canada. Three pervasive stereotypes portray Canada as (1) a physical desert, (2) a cultural wasteland and (3) a raw land of investment opportunity and resource extraction. These distortions have created an audience for stereotypes, which Canadian writers sometimes reinforced by writing romantic adventures of the frozen North, in which everything local was savage or hostile and “civilization” was imported. But over time, they sought to record local experience and to use literature to shape their own culture rather than to imitate or defer to the presumptions of another society.
Insofar as Canadian culture continues to be shaped by a range of languages in use and by wide variations in geography, social experience, Indigenous cultures, immigration patterns and proximity to Europe, Asia and the USA, the “Canadian voice” is not uniform. Nevertheless, however much their aesthetic practices and political commitments may differ, Canadian writers bring many shared perspectives to their representations of nature, civility and human interaction, whether at home or abroad.
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 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 wrote A Journey from Prince of Wales’s Fort in Hudson’s Bay to the Northern Ocean (1795), and Sir Alexander Mackenzie, 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 recorded details of his 1808 trip west to Fraser Canyon (The Letters and Journals of Simon Fraser, 1806–1808, 1960). Captain John Franklin’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) 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.
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