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Unlike all other major Anglophone points of comparison (e.g. USA, UK and Australia), Canada is disinterested in the national and global demand for doctoral programmes in Creative Writing. This paucity of PhD creative writing programmes is especially noticeable when Canada has the highest per capita undergraduate enrolment in the world, federal funding available for writing PhDs, and a low OECD ranking for the number of per capita PhDs. This illogical market denial stems in part from Canada’s preference for housing Creative Writing educations within English departments, who are hostile to creativity and living Canadian writers. Canada pays national economic, social, pedagogical and aesthetic consequences for its globally anomalous disinterest in Creative Writing doctoral programmes.

Mark McGurl's The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (2009) is in many ways the critical equivalent of a Bildungsroman for American creative writing pedagogy: a narrator'...