Canadian Writing in English

                                                  Canadian Writing in English

Canadian fiction in English had its origins in the second half of the 19^th century. The History of Emily Montague (1769) by English-born Frances Brooke is considered the first Canadian, as well as the first North American, novel. Written as a series of letters, it is based on Brooke’s experiences living in a garrison (military post) in Québec in the 1760s. The novel provides a portrait of 18th-century Canada while establishing a female literary voice early in English Canadian writing. Influenced by English poet Alexander Pope and French philosopher Voltaire, Brooke used the artificial conventions of the romance in her novel to talk of matters both fashionable and political.  

Drummond, William Henry (1854-1907), Canadian poet, whose verse transcribed the mixture of French and English spoken by French inhabitants of rural Canada. Born in county Leitrim, Ireland, Drummond immigrated to Canada with his family in 1864. He was educated at McGill University. Later he practiced medicine in Québec Province, taught, and superintended his family's silver mines in Ontario. His poetry, the most popular of which is collected in The Habitant (1897), Johnny Courteau (1901), The Voyageur (1905), and The Great Fight (1908), describes the lives of the habitants (French-Canadian farmers) and records their tales and legends in verse.

Service, Robert W(illiam) (1874-1958), Canadian poet, born in Preston, England, and educated at the University of Glasgow. He immigrated to Canada in 1894. Service is known primarily for his poems describing the elemental and adventurous life of gold prospectors and others in the subarctic regions of northwestern North America, where he worked for a number of years as a bank employee. (The cabin in which he lived from 1909 to 1912 is preserved as a museum in Dawson, Yukon Territory.) The works of the British writer Rudyard Kipling influenced his poems. Two of Service's best-known poems, “The Shooting of Dan McGrew” and “The Cremation of Sam McGee,” appeared in the volume of poetry Songs of a Sourdough (1907). Service also wrote Ballads of a Cheechako (1909), Rhymes of a Rolling Stone (1912), Rhymes of a Red Cross Man (1916), and Ballads of a Bohemian (1920); the novels The Roughneck (1923) and The House of Fear (1927); and the autobiographies Ploughman of the Moon (1945) and Harper of Heaven (1948). He moved to Europe in 1912 and spent most of the rest of his life on the French Riviera.

Scott, Duncan Campbell (1862-1947), Canadian poet and writer, born in Ottawa, Ontario. He was educated at Stanstead College and served from 1879 until 1932 in Canada's department of Indian Affairs, of which he became director. Scott's work reflects his knowledge of indigenous life and his travels in the Canadian wilderness and emphasizes the heroic conflict of humanity and nature. His collections of poetry include The Magic House (1893), Labor and the Angel (1898), Lundy's Lane (1916), Beauty of Life (1921), The Green Cloister (1935), and The Circle of Affection (1947). His short stories are collected in In the Village of Viger (1896) and The Witching of Elspie (1923).

Carman, (William) Bliss (1861-1929), Canadian poet, born in Fredericton, New Brunswick, and educated at the universities of New Brunswick and Edinburgh and at Harvard University. After 1890 he did editorial work in New York City and Boston. Carman was a lyric poet; his poems were in praise of joy, love, and nature. His first book of poetry was Low Tide on Grand Pré (1893) and his last was Wild Garden (1929). His most famous poems were published in Vagabondia (3 volumes, 1894-1901). In 1928 he received the Lorne Pierce Gold Medal of the Royal Society of Canada.

Montgomery, L(ucy) M(aud) (1874-1942), Canadian writer, best known for her nostalgic novels for children set on Prince Edward Island. Born in Clifton (now New London), Prince Edward Island, Montgomery was raised by her grandparents in the nearby town of Cavendish after her mother died and her father moved to Prince Albert, Saskatchewan. She was educated at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and Prince of Wales College in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island. After working as a teacher for three years and as a newspaperwoman on the Halifax Daily Echo for a year, Montgomery, who had been writing since childhood, began publishing stories and poems in newspapers and children's magazines. Her first novel, Anne of Green Gables (1908), was an instant success in Canada and the United States and is now considered a classic of children's literature. Anne, the heroine, is a spirited, independent orphan with an active imagination and a penchant for mishap who wins the hearts of the elderly brother and sister who adopt her.

Montgomery chronicled her heroine Anne's career, marriage, and family in five additional novels, including Anne of Avonlea (1909) and Anne of the Island (1915). She also wrote two related books: Rainbow Valley (1919) and Rilla of Ingleside (1921), about one of Anne's daughters. Montgomery wrote other children's novels, including a popular series about another young orphan, Emily Byrd Starr, which includes the books Emily of New Moon (1923) and Emily's Quest (1927). Montgomery was awarded the Order of the British Empire in 1935. Anne of Green Gables has been made into several motion pictures, as well as a popular television series.

The personal narratives of Susanna Moodie were written from the perspective of a settler. She and her husband emigrated from England to Upper Canada (now Ontario) in 1832. Moodie was a member of an active literary family; her brother, Samuel Strickland, and sister, Catharine Parr Traill, were also writers and immigrated to Ontario. Moodie recorded her experiences in a series of sketches published as Roughing It in the Bush (1852). These sketches include anecdotal descriptions of fire, planting, death, climate, neighbors, and local customs. They record the conflict between Moodie’s romanticized expectations of country life and the actuality of the rigors of the wilderness. Roughing It in the Bush closes by warning middle-class English men and women not to emigrate. Moodie and her family eventually settled in the small but growing town of Belleville, and in her 1871 revision of the book not only does she acknowledges the changes that had taken place in the society around her, but she also reveals a growth in her own independence and commitment to Canada. Catharine Parr Traill established her reputation as a children’s author and a naturalist. Her memoir, The Backwoods of Canada (1836), takes the form of letters to family and friends back in England describing her experiences as a pioneer. Her writings also provide practical advice and creative solutions to many of the difficulties that prospective settlers were likely to encounter.

One reason was the success of writers such as Stephen Leacock in humorously debunking the conventions used by Barr and Allen. In Nonsense Novels (1911), for example, Leacock parodied 19th-century literary forms such as melodrama, dialect anecdote, and romance-adventure. In Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich (1914) he punctured the pretenses to sophistication of the urban rich by showing those pretenses to be nothing more than ego, faddishness, and greed. Another reason that the trend failed to take hold was an overall cultural impulse to identify Canada more in wilderness than in urban terms, a tendency that continued through much of the century. In his most coherent and enduring work, Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (1912), Leacock portrayed the foibles of small-town life, specifically the desire of small-town inhabitants to resemble their urban counterparts, whom they mistakenly took to be more sophisticated.

Sara Jeannette Duncan was a spirited newspaper reporter and extensive traveler whose writings furthered the cause of feminism in Canadian literature. Many of her works centered on an intelligent, independent female protagonist. A Social Departure (1890) is a fictionalized version of a trip Duncan took around the world with a friend. A Canadian Girl in London (1891), Those Delightful Americans (1902), and Cousin Cinderella (1908) wittily portray the lives of three young women, contrasting the different manners and mores of Canada, the United States, and England. The Simple Adventures of a Memsahib (1893), for example, incisively deals with the ironies of race and class in British India.  

War fiction include Charles Yale Harrison’s Generals Die in Bed (1930), which attacks war itself and the hierarchy of authority that sacrifices ordinary lives in the name of order, and Earle Birney’s Turvey (1949), which satirizes the Canadian intelligence service. Many popular writers of the 1920s and 1930s provided escape for their readers through romances set in the past. But even period romances often commented, although sometimes indirectly, on the disruption and disorder that followed the wars. Among these works are the rural and historical narratives of Frederick Niven, such as Mine Inheritance (1940), and the pro-British Empire saga of the fictional Whiteoaks family of Ontario, beginning with Jalna (1927), by Mazo de la Roche. But other works explored sterner realities, as for example Douglas Durkin’s work The Magpie (1923). Durkin criticized Canada’s urban, economic, and sociopolitical structures in depicting a war veteran’s struggles to rebuild his life after World War I. Martha Ostenso’s Wild Geese (1925) reveals the constricted lives of women in a small rural community. Irene Baird's Waste Heritage (1939) portrays conflicts between individuals and industry during the Great Depression of the 1930s. The autobiographical Confessions of an Immigrant's Daughter (1939), by Laura Goodman Salverson, renders in realistic detail the efforts of a community of Icelandic settlers in Canada to maintain its identity.

A group of poets and painters rose to challenge Canadian wilderness mythologies and the conventions of landscape art. The painters included Emily Carr, whose writings in Klee Wyck (1941) record her discovery of West Coast indigenous art; and Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven, young artists, mainly from Toronto, who advocated a painting style that was distinctly Canadian in spirit. These painters influenced poets of the period, particularly A. M. Klein, F. R. Scott, and A. J. M. Smith. These poets, along with poet Leo Kennedy, were known as the Montréal or McGill Group (after McGill University in Montréal). They published in the McGill Fortnightly Review, which Scott and Smith edited between 1925 and 1927, and other academic literary reviews. The Montréal Group introduced modernism into Canadian poetry, incorporating techniques adapted from contemporary European and American writers. They emphasized fragmentation, alienation, and urban sophistication. Smith's "The Lonely Land" (1936) melds the imagism (reliance on precise images) of American poet Ezra Pound with a depiction of northern Ontario landscape, while Scott's incisive lyrics, such as in his 1927 poem “The Canadian Authors Meet,” mercilessly satirize outmoded literary convention. Smith, who immigrated to Michigan, nonetheless became one of Canada’s most influential anthologists. Klein’s novel The Second Scroll (1951) is an eloquent parable about the wanderings of modern Jewry following the Holocaust of World War II. Scott, a reform-minded lawyer and political theorist who championed civil rights, honed the poetic use of the ordinary speaking voice in works such as The Eye of the Needle (1957).

Poems by the Montréal Group were collected in the 1936 anthology New Provinces, along with poems by Newfoundland writer E(dwin). J. Pratt. Pratt, who was more than 20 years older than the Montréal poets, belonged intellectually and chronologically to an earlier generation. However, along with Smith he became the chief influence in Canadian poetry from the 1930s until the 1950s. Pratt's reputation was based on his stirring narrative verse, his extravagant comic rhymes, the intensity of short poems such as “From Stone to Steel” (1932), and his national mythmaking in Towards the Last Spike (1952). This romantic narrative, which describes the construction of the Canadian transcontinental railroad, adapts epic conventions such as the hero, the catalogue (list of items), the extended metaphor, and the idea of nation-building.

MacLennan, Hugh (1907-1990), Canadian novelist, essayist, and professor of English at McGill University. His first novel, Barometer Rising (1941), concerns an actual happening, the explosion of a munitions ship that almost destroyed Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 1917. Later works include Two Solitudes (1945), about Anglo-French relations in Canada; The Watch That Ends the Night (1959), a psychological study; and Voices in Time (1980). Among MacLennans's collections of essays are Cross Country, (1949), Thirty and Three (1954), and Seven Rivers of Canada (1961).

Adele Wiseman, one of Canada's premier modern novelists. She was born in Winnipeg in 1928, and it was there that she set her best-known novel, The Sacrifice (1956), which won the Governor-General's Award. She was also highly respected as a teacher, playwright, and essayist. Her other books include the novel Crackpot (1974) and the play Testimonial Dinner (1978).

Munro, Alice (1931- ), Canadian writer, known for stories focusing on the emotional lives of the inhabitants of rural Canada. Her tales, often set in southwestern Ontario, where she spent her childhood, are characteristically written from the point of view of a young or adolescent girl and address themes of particular interest to women. In 1977 Munro became the first Canadian to win the Canada-Australia Literary Prize (1977). Born Alice Anne Laidlaw in Wingham, Ontario, Munro was educated at the University of Western Ontario. She began to write stories at the age of 15, and her first story, “The Dimensions of a Shadow,” was published in a student publication in 1950. In 1952 she moved to Vancouver, British Columbia, where she continued to write. Her first collection of short stories, Dance of the Happy Shades (1968), was an instant success, winning Canada’s highest literary honor, the Governor General's Literary Award. Munro won the award again in 1978 for the collection Who Do You Think You Are? (1978; published as The Beggar Maid in the United States, 1979) and in 1986 for the collection The Progress of Love (1986).

Munro's second book, the novel Lives of Girls and Women, was published in 1971. She returned to Ontario shortly afterward, and after the publication of the collection Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You (1974) was named writer-in-residence at the University of Western Ontario. Munro's other short-story collections include The Moons of Jupiter (1982), Friend of My Youth (1990), Open Secrets (1994), and The Love of a Good Woman (1998). The stories in The Love of a Good Woman continue in Munro’s signature vein of observing women’s lives and motivations, but many of the tales delve deeper into social and political subjects—such as generational conflicts, abortion, and adultery—than do Munro’s previous works.

Atwood, Margaret (1939- ), Canadian poet, novelist, and critic, whose works often feature women examining their relationships and society. Margaret Eleanor Atwood was born in Ottawa, Ontario. She received a bachelor’s degree from the University of Toronto in 1961 and a master’s degree from Radcliffe College in 1962. Atwood’s first book of poetry, Double Persephone, was published in 1961. She continued writing while teaching English literature at various universities in Canada from 1964 to 1972 and while acting as writer-in-residence at the University of Toronto in 1972 and 1973.

Atwood’s first novel, The Edible Woman (1969), won international acclaim. Other novels followed: Surfacing (1972), Lady Oracle (1976), and Life Before Man (1979). Objecting to the classification of some of her works as feminist, Atwood pointed out that she began dealing with themes such as growing up female in the 1950s and sex-role definitions before they were popularized by the women’s liberation movement of the 1970s. Her novel The Handmaid's Tale (1985; motion picture, 1990) won a Governor General’s Literary Award, Canada’s highest literary honor, and was followed by Cat’s Eye (1988), The Robber Bride (1993), and Alias Grace (1996). In 2000 Atwood won the prestigious Booker Prize for her novel The Blind Assassin (2000), a saga of family tragedy. The annual award is given to the best full-length novel written in the British Commonwealth.

Atwood’s books of poetry also won critical favor. The Circle Game (1966) won a Governor General’s Literary Award in 1966, and Power Politics (1971) and You Are Happy (1974) were also praised. Atwood’s critical works include Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (1972), Second Words: Selected Critical Prose (1982), and Strange Things: The Malevolent North in Canadian Literature (1995). In addition, she edited The New Oxford Book of Canadian Verse in English (1982) and The Oxford Book of Canadian Short Stories in English (1986). Her other works include Wilderness Tips (1991), a collection of short stories; Good Bones and Simple Murders (1994), a collection of prose sketches, updated fairy tales, and parodies; and Morning in the Burned House (1995), a collection of poetry. The body of Atwood’s work was awarded the Welsh Arts Council’s International Writer’s Prize in 1982.

Ondaatje, Michael (1943- ), Canadian writer and filmmaker whose novel The English Patient (1992) was cowinner of the 1992 Booker Prize, the United Kingdom’s most prestigious literary award. Ondaatje was the first Canadian to receive the prize. Ondaatje was born in Colombo, Sri Lanka, the fourth child of a privileged family of Dutch, Tamil, and Sinhalese origin. He lived with his father in Sri Lanka until 1954 when, at the age of 11, he moved to England to live with his mother. While in England he attended Dulwich College. In 1962 he emigrated to Canada, where he studied at Bishop’s University, Lennoxville, Québec, concentrating in English literature and history. It was during this time that he began to write poetry. He transferred to the University of Toronto in the last year of his studies and received his B.A. degree in 1965. He received his M.A. degree from Queen’s University, Ontario, in 1967. Although his poems had previously been included in anthologies, Ondaatje published his first book of poetry, The Dairy Monsters, in 1967. Two more collections of poetry followed: The Man with Seven Toes (1969) and Rat Jelly (1973). All three collections were acclaimed for their surrealistic use of gruesome images and unexpected juxtapositions. Later volumes of poetry include There’s a Trick With a Knife I’m Learning to Do (1979) and The Cinnamon Peeler (1990).

Ondaatje’s novels combine poetry, prose, and visual representation, as well as fact and fiction, as exemplified in The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (1970). His book Coming Through Slaughter (1979) examines the life of New Orleans jazz musician Buddy Bolden. Running in the Family (1982) is a semiautobiographical exploration of personal and public myth, based on a trip by Ondaatje to the country of his birth. In the Skin of a Lion (1987), one of his best-received works, is set in Toronto during the 1920s and 1930s. Ondaatje’s next book was the poetry collection Handwriting (1999). The novel Anil’s Ghost (2000) focuses on a human rights worker and is set in Sri Lanka in the mid-1980s, when a civil war was just beginning. His other novels are Divisadero and The Cat’s Table (2011). He has edited three anthologies: the poetry collection The Broken Ark (1971), the short-story collection Personal Fictions (1977), and The Long Poem Anthology (1979).

George Ryga was best known for his 1967 play The Ecstasy of Rita Joe, a frightening depiction of a young Indian girl who cannot live by the ways of her people but cannot adapt to urban existence. His Sunrise on Sara (1973) too received critical acclaim. The theater of conscience which he represented has been eclipsed by the political neoconservatism of the 1980s.

 During the later 1980s and the 1990s, Canadian drama in English confronted rigid value systems, challenged racial and gender stereotypes, and experimented with dramatic form. Ann-Marie MacDonald's Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet) (1990) rewrote Shakespeare, giving voice to women's empowerment. Brad Fraser’s Unidentified Human Remains and the True Nature of Love (1989) and Poor Superman (1996) tore apart sexual preconceptions and misconceptions with their confrontational language and forceful characters. Sharon Pollock's Blood Relations (1980) uses the story of Lizzie Borden, who was accused of murdering her father and stepmother, in an examination of family relationships, social structure, and the difficult intermingling of the two. Judith Thompson’s plays, including I Am Yours (1987) and Lion in the Streets (1990), challenged accepted social values, particularly as they affect the lives of young women seeking independence, and dealt increasingly with failures of communication. Joan MacLeod’s Toronto, Mississippi (1987) studies various forms of victimization, asking its audience to rethink the nature of human compassion by dissecting family relationships that form around a mentally handicapped 18-year-old, while Sally Clark’s Moo (1988) offers an incisive and comic portrayal of a woman who refuses to be victimized. Cree writer Tomson Highway’s plays The Rez Sisters (1986) and Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing (1989) explore the social, linguistic, and sexual conflicts facing indigenous peoples. In the spirit of a Cree trickster character named Nanabush, who appears in both plays, Highway imbued his work with a lively sophistication and multiple issues and concerns. The presence of more native, black, Hispanic, and Métis authors in the 1990s drew increased attention to issues of ethnicity in Canadian drama. Dramatists who explored the boundaries and limits of ethnic identities include Drew Hayden Taylor, Monique Mojica, Guillermo Verdecchia, Djanet Sears, Maria Campbell, and Linda Griffiths.

Davies, Robertson (1913-1995), Canadian novelist, essayist, and playwright, best known for three trilogies about Canadian life that are distinguished by their firm moral sense, narrative strength, and elegant use of myth, reality, and illusion. Davies uses a variety of approaches—including comedy, satire, myth, coming-of-age fiction, allegory, and historical romance—to depict Canadian subjects. His fiction is concerned primarily with the survival of the human spirit in his characters, who quest for their own place in the world while trying not to hurt others.

Davies's three noted trilogies are the Salterton Trilogy (Tempest-Tost, 1951; Leaven of Malice, 1954; and A Mixture of Frailties, 1958), which is slow-paced in the style of the Victorian novel; the Deptford Trilogy (Fifth Business, 1970; The Manticore, 1972; and World of Wonders, 1976), which is heavily influenced by Davies's Jungian views of psychology; and the Cornish Trilogy (The Rebel Angels, 1981; What's Bred in the Bone, 1985; and The Lyre of Orpheus, 1988), which draws on Jungian themes and is heavily allegorical. Davies also wrote four volumes of the collected diaries and essays of “Samuel Marchbanks,” a fictional Canadian provincial whom Davies called his “cranky alter ego.” As a playwright, Davies achieved his greatest success with historical dramas employing 18th- and 19th-century settings, including At My Heart's Core (1952), A Jig for the Gypsy (1954), Hunting Stuart (1955), and General Confession (1956). His final work, the novel The Cunning Man, was published in 1994.

Sheila Watson and Mordecai Richler, both of whom extended the traditional use of language in Canadian fiction. Watson revamped Canadian prose form in The Double Hook (1959), a parable about fear, death, and the making of meaning, by using cadence (the rhythm of writing) and image rather than plot for communicating ideas. Richler had published two novels before 1959, but he made his reputation that year with a romping, bawdy novel, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz. The initiation story of a boy from a Jewish district in Montréal, it shows the title character pushing his way to success, alienating both Gentiles and his own family along the way. The novel’s vigorous colloquial language and comic set pieces further modified Canadian prose style. Richler honed this comic, colloquial prose in St. Urbain’s Horseman (1972), Joshua Then and Now (1980), and in what may be his most sustained and most sympathetic satire of modern mores, Barney’s Version (1997).

Laurence, (Jean) Margaret (1926-1987), Canadian writer, born in Manitoba. Her chief concern, the development of women's characters as they struggle for self-realization in a male-dominated world, is explored in such novels as This Side Jordan (1960); The Stone Angel (1964); A Jest of God (1966)—which formed the basis of the film Rachel, Rachel (1968); The Fire Dwellers (1969); and Heart of a Stranger (1977). Subsequently, she turned to the writing of stories for children. Laurence's special interest in Africa, where she lived for a time after her marriage, is revealed in A Tree for Poverty (1954), a collection of Somali poems and tales, and Long Drums and Cannons (1968), a critical study of Nigerian literature.

Laurence’s work is for the most part lodged in Manitoba, in an invented small town the author calls Manawaka. The Manawaka cycle, a series of five books, is concerned with the intertwined lives of four generations of prairie women. In The Stone Angel (1964) and The Diviners (1974), which open and close the series, Laurence demonstrates her ability to orchestrate the different regional dialects of Canada and to construct a social mythology out of a relatively new Canadian society.

The multiculturalism of late-20th-century Canada is evident in the contributions by writers of many different backgrounds. Joy Kogawa’s Obasan (1981) and its sequel Itsuka (1990) examine the history of Japanese Canadians and the persistent difficulties arising from their forced internment by the government during World War II. Austin Clarke's several novels, including Survivors of the Crossing (1964) and The Origin of Waves (1997), address his origins in the Caribbean island of Barbados and the problems of race in Toronto. Bharati Mukherjee, in Wife (1975) and Jasmine (1990), draws on her Bengali heritage to explore the problems of adaptation for an Indian woman in North America. Her husband, Clark Blaise, wrote A North American Education (1973) and several other stories that draw on his United States upbringing and Canadian parentage. Blaise and Mukherjee also experimented with autobiographical form in Days and Nights in Calcutta (1979), a dual narrative about a year spent in India. In this book, Blaise tells of his discoveries as an outsider, while Mukherjee records her return as an insider.

Rudy Wiebe’s writing explores cultural boundaries and differences. He sought the sources of Mennonite faith in The Blue Mountains of China (1970), and the sources of passion and the power to persuade in stories such as The Temptations of Big Bear (1973) and The Scorched-Wood People (1977). The latter two are about leaders of indigenous people and of Métis, and about the difficulties faced by an artist trying to cross from the mode of perception of one culture to that of another.

Dionne Brand’s Sans Souci and Other Stories (1988) examines the racism and violence faced by Caribbean immigrants in Toronto. In Tales from Firozsha Baag (1987), a collection of short stories, Rohinton Mistry broadly satirizes the culture shock experienced by the Indian Parsi (Zoroastrian) community in Toronto and Bombay. Firozsha Baag is a Bombay apartment complex; the intertwined stories tell of several young men who grew up within the constraints of both the apartment complex and the Parsi community that dominated it. In the last story, "Swimming Lessons," one of the men immigrates to Canada, and in the new culture he must learn to “swim” all over again in an unfamiliar society. Mistry’s novels, including Such a Long Journey (1991) and A Fine Balance (1995), retain his humor, but they also look more deeply at the history and social conditions of the Parsis. In the latter novel especially, Mistry dramatizes the aspirations and defeats that punctuate the stratification of Indian society in the 1970s, and he analyzes the forms of power that perpetuate social inequalities.

Important late-20th-century works by indigenous writers include Beatrice Culleton’s In Search of April Raintree (1983) and Jeannette Armstrong’s Slash (1985), both of which explore in harrowing detail the social obstacles and racist stigmas facing indigenous peoples in Canada. Novels, stories, and essays by Basil Johnston, Lee Maracle, Alootook Ipellie, Ian Ross, and Lenore Keeshig-Tobias present strong perspectives on indigenous communities, language and identity, and cultural autonomy. Thomas King’s novels Medicine River (1990) and Green Grass, Running Water (1993), as well as his collection of stories One Good Story, That One (1993), are cagily informed by the trickster character of native folklore, Coyote. They combine deadpan humor with provocative commentary on the racial and social misidentifications inherent in North American stereotypes of native peoples. King dissects the mentality behind these dated stereotypes, encouraging a wry celebration of the contradictions that shape a person’s sense of self and place. Many of his stories question the artificiality of national and cultural borders.

Two other important late-20th-century writers, Jack Hodgins and Timothy Findley, experimented with narrative form. Hodgins was influenced in his early works by American writer William Faulkner and the imaginative fabrications and magic realism of South American literature. In later novels he moved to analyze the forces that shaped the century and that threaten to stifle the artist's voice. In books such as Spit Delaney’s Island (1976) and The Invention of the World (1978), he transformed his native Vancouver Island into a mythical world populated by irrepressible characters, would-be storytellers, and giants of the imagination. The later work Broken Ground (1998) alludes to the same communities, but demonstrates—through multiple voices and points of view—how repressed stories of war and responsibility for violence return to disrupt the lives of every postwar generation in the 20th century.

Findley’s novel The Wars (1977) takes the reader through the dislocating experience of World War I, symbolically recording not a new future but the death of possibility. Findley’s Famous Last Words (1981) is ostensibly about a document written on a wall by Hugh Selwyn Mauberley—a character invented by American poet Ezra Pound—and discovered by a young soldier at the end of World War II. The book tells of the intrigues and quest for power that led to the war in the first place and that made fascists of both political rulers and ordinary people. Findley’s later fiction extended his inclination for revisiting classic tales. Not Wanted on the Voyage (1984) views the biblical story of Noah’s ark from the imagined perspective of Noah’s supposedly shrewish wife, while Headhunter (1992) relocates to Toronto the story of Heart of Darkness (1902) by British writer Joseph Conrad. Findley’s short fiction—including Dinner Along the Amazon (1984) and Stones (1988)—focuses on themes such as the power of memory, the decay of the family, and the loss of sanity.

Carol Shields, a Canadian American writer based in Winnipeg, Manitoba, won the Canadian Governor General’s Literary Award, the American National Book Critics Circle Award, and the American Pulitzer Prize for fiction for her novel The Stone Diaries (1993). The story pieces together a woman’s life from historical fragments and conjectural fictions. Shields’s works, including Happenstance (1980), The Republic of Love (1992), and Larry’s Party (1997), examine the barriers and detours stemming from the fictions that human beings habitually tell about themselves.

Among the most popular and widely read of younger Canadian writers are Douglas Coupland and William Gibson, both of whom live in Vancouver. Coupland’s Generation X (1991) gave a name and a voice to young, disaffected urbanites who feel their lives are thwarted by history. Its story explores lives emptied of meaning in a media-saturated consumer culture. American-born Gibson combined science fiction, hard-boiled detective writing, and pop culture in a style that became known as cyberpunk. His novels and stories, including Neuromancer (1984), Count Zero (1986), and Johnny Mnemonic (1995), Monalisa Overdrive describe a world in which unlikely protagonists struggle against crazed technocrats and insidious computer networks, articulating deep-rooted anxieties over autonomy and power. When William Gibson published his first novel, Neuromancer, in 1984, he was a little-known writer of science-fiction stories. Neuromancer introduced the concepts of cyberspace and virtual reality, and launched a genre within the world of science-fiction writing that came to be known as cyberpunk. Gibson followed its success with several more popular novels.