● Introduction: the Literature of Survival
● Native Canadian Mythology
● Early Colonial Literature
● The Literature of Nation-Building
● Canada in the Ascendant
● Canadian Literature in the Modern World

Early Colonial Literature

Canada did not come into being as a single entity until 1867 when various British North American colonies were brought together into a confederation, so that before that date there was a definite marginal sense to Canadian writing. It has been described as an era of reporting: telling people back "home" what it was like out there on the edge of civilization. Thus books published in that era took the form of journals or collections of letters, which often took the "wilderness", or the native peoples as their subject. Susanna Moodie's Roughing It in the Bush of 1852 would be a good example of such a description of the colonist's experience in dealing with the harsh Canadian environment, surviving in the new world in which she found herself.

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