Nothing in our history is as constant as the sound of the Canadian voice celebrating in triumph or in tears, our past, our present, and our destiny. To read John George Bourinot’sOur Intellectual Strength and Weakness(1893), Thomas Guthrie Marquis’ ‘English-Canadian Literature’ (1913) and Camille Roy's Trench-Canadian Literature’ (1913) is to mark the introduction and establishment of guidelines, critical and cultural rationalizations and contingencies, that structure and inform our ways of looking at ourselves and our literature throughout its succession of important documents — through E. K. Brown’sOn Canadian Poetry(1943) to Northrop Frye’s ‘Conclusion’ toThe Literary History...

I cannot more appropriately commence this address than by reference to an oration delivered seven years ago in the great hall of a famous university which stands beneath the stately elms of Cambridge, in the old “Bay State” of Massachusetts : a noble seat of learning in which Canadians take a deep interest, not only because some of their sons have completed their education within its walls, but because it represents that culture and scholarship which know no national lines of separation, but belong to the world's great Federation of Learning. The orator was a man who, by his deep...

Has Canada a voice of her own in literature distinct from that of England ? This question has attracted a good deal of attention in Canada and has been the subject of numerous discussions in home magazines and reviews. In Great Britain, however, the critical periodicals apparently have not yet recognized a purely Canadian¹ literature. While these periodicals have frequently reviewed the literatures of Norway, Sweden, Russia, the United States, Spain, Italy and other countries, no British critic so far seems to have thought Canadian literary achievement of sufficient importance to treat it seriously as a whole or to look...

The literary history of the French Canadians may be said to date from the year 1760, or, if one prefers, from the cession of Canada to England. Before that time, indeed, there had been certain manifestations of literary life in New France: there had been accounts of travel, like those of Champlain ; interesting narratives, like theRelationsof the Jesuits; histories like that of Charlevoix; studies of manners like those of the of the Lafitau ; and instructive letters, full of shrewd observations, like those of the Mère Marie de l’Incarnation. But these works were, for the most part,...