The experience of wrestling with a rigorous climate and wilderness have shaped the Canadian imagination
Canadian literature, the body of written works produced by
Canadians. Reflecting the country’s dual origin and its official bilingualism,
the literature of Canada can be split into two major divisions: English and
French. This article provides a brief historical account of each of these
literatures.
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 experience of wrestling with a rigorous climate and wilderness have shaped the Canadian 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 experience of wrestling with a rigorous climate and wilderness
have shaped the Canadian imagination , 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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