The Routledge Introduction to Victorian Canadian Literature

by Thomas Hodd

2025 · Taylor & Francis

This study is a comprehensive overview of the literature produced in Canada during the reign of Queen Victoria (1837–1901). Whereas previous examinations of this fertile literary period have been discussed in the context of larger, more abstract terms like "early Canadian literature" and "19th century Canadian literature," this book offers a more narrowly focused examination of the kinds of literary shifts and transformations that occurred as British North America pivoted from its colonial beginnings to its new Confederation (and post-Confederation) reality. Focusing on the four main genres – non-fiction, drama, poetry, and prose fiction – this book draws together a rich corpus of notable works in order to illustrate the hybrid nature of the period’s literature. It also seeks to demonstrate the many ways in which Victorian-Canadian writers engaged in trans-Atlantic and transnational literary experimentation.

The Mephibosheth Stepsure Letters

by Thomas McCulloch, Thomas M'Culloch

1990 · McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP

Originally published in the Acadian Reader, a Halifax newspaper, in the early 1820s, the letters earned for their author the distinction of being called "the founder of genuine Canadian humour" by Northrop Frye.

Our Intellectual Strength and Weakness

by John George Bourinot, Thomas Guthrie Marquis

1973 · University of Toronto Press

These three works, displaying marked differences in purpose, tone, and effect, are all classics of Canadian literary and cultural criticism. John George Bourinot was a man of letters, an Imperialist, and a biculturalist, who was confident of his knowledge of the Canadian identity and felt it to be his public mission to align reality with his own personal vision. Writing in 1893 to the élite represented by the members of the Royal Society, he described his work as ‘a monograph on the intellectual development of the Dominion,’ describing ‘the progress of culture in a country still struggling with the difficulties of the material development of half a continent.’ Two decades later, Thomas Guthrie Marquis and Camille Roy wrote what were, in contrast, specialized assignments, contributions to the compendium history, Canada and Its Provinces (1913). Addressing a far larger audience, and treating a vastly enlarged body of Canadian literature, their work comes much closer to contemporary scholarship, with greater clarity, organization, and sheer bulk of information, but with the loss of some of the charm and assurance of Bourinot’s wide sweep. In further contrast to Bourinot’s determined biculturalism and will to unity, Roy and Marquis’ essays display vivid differences in the emotional allegiances and convictions of the founding cultures. Marquis starts by asking the question, ‘Has Canada a voice of her own in literature distinct from that of England?’; Roy treats French-Canadian literature in its Roman Catholic contexts.