|
● 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
Canada
in the Ascendant
 Though
Canada had had a high degree of independence from Britain for a
while, it was not really until the
Statute of Westminster in 1931 that Canadian nationhood
became a fact, as it took its position as an equal and vigorous
nation within the voluntary
association
of the
British Commonwealth. Canadian visual
art of the period had its experimentally Modernist painters in the
well—known “Group
of Seven”
artists. Canadian literature also had a
|
|
|
Group of Seven
Members in 1920
|
|
|
|
|
Algoma by A.Y.Jacson
|
Algonquin Sketch
by Lawren Harris
|
Modernist group, influenced by work
in Europe: the "Montreal
Group" of poets who published in a journal founded in
1925 by two poets including F.R.
Scott, a politically active writer who satirized
the Canadian politician
Mackenzie King
in a way which provides some insight
into Canadian insecurity
about their identity.
Canadians
had to deal with the great international political events of the
interwar
period too. The Spanish
Civil War of 1936 raised the political awareness
of many intellectuals. Ted Allan wrote a novel based on his experience
as a volunteer
in Spain called This Time a Better Earth (1939). He served
there with another young Canadian, a doctor called
Norman Bethune, and later wrote his biography The
Scalpel, The Sword (1952) including the period of Bethune's
activities in China with Mao Zedong.
In
the French language, which effectively forms a separate traditional
Canadian literature, Jean—Charles Harvey wrote against French separatism,
calling for reform in the province of Quebec. His
novel Fear's Folly (1934) attacked what he saw as a
"triple
alliance"
between
church, capitalists and politicians to keep people in fear and ignorance.
The relationship between French and English Canada was most famously
the subject of Hugh
Maclennan’s 1945 novel The Two Solitudes, which described
an English professor, whose wife is dying of cancer
in a Montreal hospital. The title refers to the separateness of
Canada's two main ethnic groups.
Previous Page Next
Page
|
