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While scholarship focused on Alice Munro’s fiction has been an ongoing feature of Canadian literature since the early 1980s (the first analogous volume to this one was Probable Fictions [1983]), an...

Archibald MacMechan’s regular column in the Montreal Standard entitled “The Dean’s Window” (1906–1933) is an important index to educated antimodernist literary values. MacMechan brought his...

This article focuses on “appropriation of voice” or “cultural appropriation” in the Canadian Studies classroom. It is aimed at instructors who teach Canadian Literature outside Canada, in p...

This paper engages selected moments in Austin Clarke’s literary journey to argue that in spite of his involvement in the development of Canadian literature (CanLit) during the 1960s and 197...

In The Chronicle of Higher Education, Emily Toth, writing as Ms. Mentor, asserts that older academics “still owe it to the world to use the uniqueness of your highly educated mind.” She goes on to ...

This article argues that expressions of national identity in twentieth-century Euro-Canadian literature often conceive of the nation as existing in both ethnic and ostensibly pluralist, immigration-based models, and that the former is frequently valorized over the latter, resulting in the implicit legitimation of settler colonialism. It does so by examining a few major theorizations of nationalism—constructivism, ethno-symbolism, and ethnonationalism—and suggesting that literary critics’ frequent adherence to the constructivism of Benedict Anderson can sometimes obscure the aforementioned dynamic. Finally, this article reads Laura Goodman Salverson’s The Viking Heart (1923) as a text that renders in all its contradiction the problem of ethnicity and nation in Canada, arguing that Salverson combines (but does not synthesize) the twin forces of ethnicity and liberal pluralism that make up the Euro-Canadian imagination’s split conception of the nation.

This article discusses Karsten Heuer’s 2006 book Being Caribou in light of debates in ecocriticism and border studies about how to define the local in the context of environmental problems of vast range and uncertain temporality. It explores how Heuer’s book about following the Porcupine Caribou herd’s migration engages in multiple forms of boundary crossing—between countries, between hemispheric locations, and between species—and shows how insights from Indigenous storytelling complicate the book’s appeal to environmentalist readers by asserting a prior, transnational Indigenous presence in the transboundary landscapes of present-day Alaska and the Yukon.

Since at least 1970, Canadian writers have been working to represent historical events and Native life in their poetry and prose fictions mainly from a postcolonial perspective and metafictively. They have produced a broadly written fiction that is ideologically postmodern in its deconstruction of realist fiction's presumptions and designs respecting history, while in their interrogation of the ideology in received versions of narrative history they implicitly further their claim to a truer historical truth. Examples of this revisionist literature proliferate in contemporary Canadian literature, in works by every major Canadian writer of the past half-century. Apart from the politics of its implicit claim to historical truth, more often than not such art is lessened by sentimentalism. Two of the most celebrated examples of this continuing revisionist literary history are Joy Kogawa's Obasan (1981), which deals with the mistreatment of Japanese Canadians during and after the Second World War—their forced e...

Recent calls for a greater emphasis on the teaching of Quebec literature from primary school to cegep once more link the teaching of Quebec literature with the survival of a language and a culture. The current debate echoes those which have taken place over the last 100 years, both under the denominational system of education and since the Revolution tranquille. Different pedagogical and ideological factors have influenced not only whether Francophone Canadian literature has been taught, but also what has been taught and how it has been taught. Anxieties about the status, history and definition of “notre litterature” have recurred throughout the century, as have concerns about the relationship between the literature of Quebec and the literature of metropolitan France. This article will discuss the teaching of literature in Quebec since 1900 to conclude with a consideration of the teaching of Francophone Canadian literature in Quebec today.

This article traces the way in which Canadian author Joan Barfoot's novel Exit Lines draws upon the pastoral tradition in its representation of old age. Pastoral literature has traditionally encoded ideologies of age, and it is the inclusion of pastoral tropes that structures Barfoot's participation in the discussion of population aging currently taking place across disciplines and in the popular media. Pastoral writing is characterized by an acceptance of vulnerability and loss, and this provides Barfoot with an effective counterpoint to a contemporary culture of “positive” aging founded on an ethic of bodily control that alternately stigmatizes and masks the existence of decline and dependency in late life. The novel questions the way in which the rhetoric of crisis that characterizes discussions of population aging threatens to generate resentment against the dependent elderly, whom the novel depicts as vulnerable to exploitation by those who stand to profit from this “crisis.”

Just recently I've been re-reading Timothy Findley's excellent 1977 Governor-General's Award winning novel, The Wars, for a course I'm team-teaching called “Canada's Great War.” I've taught that no...

Hundreds of Canadian literature anthologies have been published since the pre-Confederation era, in both official languages, showcasing both poetry and prose. In 1837, John Simpson, an Upper Canada...

Literary critics have long been in the business of defining literary eras. Often the task is to organize national literatures into manageable segments, providing readers with landmarks for what might otherwise seem like a sea of narrative. This categorization usually involves making the literature understandable according to larger national stories. British literature, for example, evolved into categories the Renaissance, the Romantic Period, the Victorian Period, the Modern Period, to name a few--defined by time periods that are now widely accepted, although the exact dates may still vary from critic to critic (Abrams 1988, 134 135). American literature is organized around wars relevant to the definition of the country (the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, World War I, World War II). American literary critic Meyer Abrams suggests that what does not fit into the larger national story is often downloaded into subcategories, "some [of which] name a time span or a form of political organization, others a prominent intellectual or imaginative mode, and others still a predominant form of literature" (1988, 130). Canadian literature has not yet been the subject of intensive debate about categorization, in part because it has only recently, by comparison, been packaged as a national literature at all. To complicate matters, English, American, and Canadian national stories share overarching political events such as World War I and World War II, as well as overlapping critical concepts and generic histories associated with the development of the English language. Nevertheless, one would expect Canada's literary categories to differ according to the country's unique and important national moments, just as other national literatures differ according to theirs. I suggest that one of these moments is captured in the time span of 1965-1980. This era is uniquely important to Canadian literature because widespread changes in political understandings of national and female identities contextualized the appreciation of literature published during this time. As will be detailed, identity politics in this era was made up of two dominant social movements--Canadian nationalism and second-wave feminism--that prompted Canadians and women to think of themselves differently. For example, a wider range of Canadians committed to their national cultural autonomy found economic issues important. Historian Sylvia Bashevkin reports that "Gallup surveys show that approximately 7 1 per cent of Canadians in 1975 believed that the country had enough US investment, compared with a level of 52 per cent in 1961" (1991, 24). Similarly, the second-wave feminist movement, typically described as "a highly visible proliferation of women's organizations that mobilized an unprecedented range and number of women," politicized issues arising from the idea that women were being denied autonomy in a sexist society (Prentice el. al. 1996, 414). That these two movements came together at the same place among the same people contributes vitally to the ways Canadian and female fictional characters were understood at this time. Any attempt at literary periodization invites the question of why we need a category at all. Certainly an arbitrary span of years should be seen according to some special coherence only if it can pay its own freight in the currency of adding something important to understanding that literature. After all, people living at a particular time do not necessarily know that they are living in a defining era, much less when that period might begin or end. There is no suggestion here that this claim of coherence in the years 1965-1980 is either encompassingly descriptive or prescriptive of the literature that should be studied. Instead, it is a conclusion drawn from what was important to a majority of people in a national context at a certain time, and is meant to generate rather than conclude debate and discussion. My argument suggests that the most salient aspect of the 1965-1980 era was located in the political and social Zeitgeist regarding identity, and not in the literature itself Cultural theorist Imre Szeman observes that "in Canada the concept of the nation is articulated differently within literary criticism than within literature," and that "in Canada (the nation] can be seen as emerging pre-eminently as a strategy of reading" (2003, 164). …

In American and Canadian literature, the notion of one West, two myths seems plausible. The large "W" Western--formula fiction in which violence resolves a conflict between good and evil--expresses distinctly American cultural values, the argument goes, constituting a Puritan morality play. And it is also possible to argue for subtle differences in the presentation of the American and Canadian Wests even in a grimly realistic, transnational literature like the prairie or farming novel in which the heavy hand of environmental determinism would seem to impose sameness. (1) The theme of the Melting Pot, for example, appears more pronounced in such American novels as Willa Cather's O Pioneers! (1913) and My Antonia (1918) and O.E. Rolvaag's Peder Victorious (1929 than in comparable Canadian prairie novels also concerned with the immigrant experience such as Martha Ostenso's Wild Geese (1925) and Frederick Philip Grove's Our Daily Bread (1928). Does the same holds true of imagery? Is there, in Canadian representations of the West, more emphasis on farming and family, on an arcadian idyll rather than on the whoop-and-holler action, violent conflict and rugged individualism so prominent in American Western art? Of course, the promotional literature and the accompanying illustrations issued by railways and governmental agencies on both sides of the border emphasized the fecundity of the land and abundant cereal crops or fruit trees or whatever was particular to the area being promoted. And there is a whole prairie school of art showing wheat fields and grain elevators silhouetted against towering skies. Notably, in his useful anthology Images of the West: Changing Perceptions of the Prairies, 1690-1960, Douglas Francis devotes attention to the idea of the Canadian West as the promised land, the garden of the world; cowboys and cattle are conspicuous by their absence. (2) Indeed, the coats of arms of two of the three Prairie Provinces--Alberta and Saskatchewan--feature grain. Only Manitoba's displays a ruminant, a majestic buffalo, leaving cattle shut out entirely. (3) But if Alberta's coat of arms is content to honor its farming potential at the expense of its grazing industry, it does include the snowcapped Rockies. Tourist imagery, naturally, emphasizes nature at its grandest, with soaring mountain peaks and all the possibilities for alpine recreation--from trail hikes and rides, skiing and climbing, to simple contemplation of the scenery from the veranda of a hotel set on the shore of a glimmerglass lake. (4) Hunting and fishing in the West produced its own body of literature and illustration squarely within the venerable tradition devoted to outdoors adventure. (5) But heritage was also always part of the tourist sales pitch: an Old West, gone with the wind and magic in memory. Nostalgia doted on the picturesque. In the imagery popularized by Western art, cowboys and Indians ruled on both sides of the border. It has become something of a truism in the historiography of the Canadian West to insist that its ranching frontier was distinctive from that of the American West. A strong British tradition, enforced by the arrival of the North-West Mounted Police in 1874, outweighed American elements, the reasoning goes, producing a respect for law and order that virtually eliminated the "wild and woolly" antics so prevalent to the south. (6) What might be referred to--politely--as the Lewis G. Thomas school of ranching history, followed his pathbreaking 1935 Masters thesis on "The Ranching Period in Southern Alberta." As a member of a southern Alberta ranch family himself, educated in Okotoks and Calgary and then at the University of Alberta and Harvard, and an unabashed anglophile, Thomas was convinced that the refined culture of the ranch community is Southern Alberta was quite distinct from the rougher, cruder American culture below the border. (7) He and his followers acknowledged strong American influences in the earliest history of the Canadian range and in practical matters of cattle management, but otherwise discounted them. …

The most frequently required course in American higher education is English composition. Although sometimes referred to as "dumbbell English" or "bonehead English" by Americans, the ubiquitous first-year English course, according to composition historian Sharon Crowley, is "a sentimental favorite in America, like big bands and Colin Powell" (1998, 228). Because the course is so prominent in American higher education, American academics from all disciplines are frequently surprised to learn that Canadian universities typically do not require first-year composition. Literature courses--survey courses or ABC courses (American, British, and Canadian literature)--are sometimes compulsory, and specific degree-programs within a university may require students to take either a literature or writing-intensive class. Some similarities notwithstanding, the nature of the first-year English curriculum in Canada is significantly different than the typical composition requirement in American colleges and universities. The relevance of these curricular differences for a multidisciplinary audience interested in Canadian studies is both historical and future-directed. The primary goal of this essay is not to argue for or against composition in Canadian universities and colleges, but to tell the history of the powerful impact of national cultures on an activity as apparently mundane as the teaching of first-year university English. The secondary goal is to speculate on the usefulness of first-year English as a barometer of change in the relationship between higher education and national cultures. While the focus is on Canada's culture and curriculum, the parallel American history must be presented in order to give the Canadian story shape and significance. The different national cultures--which in this essay will mean the dominant national attitudes and biases of each country, particularly towards education (American pragmatism, Canadian philosophical idealism)--have had similarly deep impacts, but with very different results. A handful of books and articles have elucidated these national traditions and attitudes for scholars of English in Canada (Harris 1976; Hubert 1994 Harmonius, 1994 "A History," 1995; Graves 1994; Johnson 1988; 1991); this essay builds on this work, updates it, and stresses a broad cultural relevance in this history for a largely American, multidisciplinary audience. This history is undertaken in the context of widespread concern about the future of higher education in North America. Bill Readings argues in his influential The University in Ruins, that "national cultures" are no longer a guiding factor in shaping curriculums and he employs the dramatic imagery of contemporary scholars "dwelling in the ruins of an institution that has lost its mission (1996, 16; 166-79). But late in his book he says: "I will cheerfully admit that in all probability far less will have changed in the daily life of professors and students [in the twenty-first century] than one might expect. Significant shifts, though, are taking place in the way in which everyday practices are organized and ascribed meaning" (166). Underneath the two distinct but stable curriculums is a rich history of economic, cultural, and disciplinary motives for shifting (Or attempting to shift) the meaning of the term "composition." This analysis draws heavily on the ways composition has been represented by scholars in Canada to one another and to the public, placing it within the changing economic and social environments that have influenced higher education in Canada over the past fifty years. The meanings of composition established in Canada and the United States during the first half of the twentieth century will be briefly treated, then the focus shifts to the ways in which a highly developed sense of Canadian national culture was instrumental in keeping American composition located in a discursive field of practicality and popular culture and outside of Canadian higher education between 1957 and 1976. …

Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Canadian literature, specifically fiction about the Canadian West, frequently had multiple national origins and audiences. Some fiction by Canadian authors was published solely in Canada; a good percentage was also published in the United States; and some novels, particularly by popular writers like Ralph Connor, were published in Toronto, New York, and London. During the same period, a number of British novelists were also writing stories about the Canadian West, published first in London for British readers and, if successful, subsequently in New York or Toronto. For Canadian and British-born novelists alike, the prairies and foothills of the West (though frequently portrayed with very little accuracy or detail) served as an ideal setting for adventure and romance. While the entire corpus of turn-of-the-century novels written about the West has generally been considered part of Canadian literature, regardless of an author's origin, the ideological and mythologica l functions of the West in this literature often vary significantly depending on a given author's nationality. The purpose of this essay is to draw a line of distinction between fictions of the Canadian West produced by Canadian and British writers and, by analyzing constructions of work and masculinity in these texts, to show that British novelists utilized the West to address particular British cultural anxieties quite removed from the concerns of Canadian writers. More specifically, I will argue that while Canadian-born authors like Ralph Connor and Robert J.C. Stead attempted to fashion a masculinity of work suited to civilizing the Western territories, British writers engaged in a cultural redefinition of the "gentleman," a redefinition designed to celebrate the masculine and genteel virtues of emigrant manual labor at a time when British gentlemen faced professional unemployment at home. Late-Victorian novels like John Mackie's The Heart of the Prairie (1899) and James Morton's Polson's Probation (1897) insist that gentility cannot be sacrificed by working in the West, and that only by working with his hands can a British boy achieve manhood and become a gentleman. These British texts purport to ennoble manual labor and thus appear to concur with Connor's steadfast Christian manliness. However, because the British narratives so rarely depict work and replace it with a West filled with adventure and sport, what emerges from these texts is less a sense of genteel, working manhood than a state of perpetual adolescence which handicapped actual British emigrants with false expectations. II will begin by discussing briefly the masculine mythos in the novels of Ralph Connor before proceeding to the major focus of the essay, British fictions of the Canadian West. In Ralph Connor's fiction, the ideal man is invariably a Westerner. J. Lee Thompson and John Thompson have shown that, for Connor, a man's full potential can only be realized in the West, just as Canada's national destiny will only come to fruition in the "stern but redemptive environment" of the West. (1) In novels like The Sky Pilot, The Man from Glengarry, The Foreigner, and Corporal Cameron, Connor symbolizes the making of a nation in the making of a man, and thus settles on a readily identifiable model of manhood as the exemplar of Canadianness. Like the British authors discussed below, Connor too is invested in the ideal of the gentleman who works hard, but with an eye toward how that ideal defines a Canadian. For Connor, the true Canadian is Anglicized, in that he adapts English habits of orderliness along with a Protestant outlook, but without the Englishman's sense of class hierarchy. Kalman Kalmar, the hero of The Foreigner (1909), successfully sheds his Eastern European traditions and becomes a "go od Canadian"--Canadian enough to marry the Scottish heroine Marjorie Menzies. Connor felt that if Canada was to achieve cultural greatness, however, the West must not only assimilate "foreign" cultural identities, it must also call forth a new breed of Anglo-Saxon man, a breed significantly different from the men found in many British novels about Canada. …

In several of her novels, Margaret Atwood offers a clear picture of Toronto. That picture is so accurate that, when the Modern Language Association met in Toronto in 1997, The Margaret Atwood Society could sponsor a walking tour of the city guided by the text of Cat's Eye (1989). Whether the novel is the early The Edible Woman (1969) or the later The Robber Bride (1993), this geographical precision is present throughout the fiction. Atwood, however, gradually moves beyond the simple provision of accurately rendered scenes; she uses mapped places in Toronto metaphorically in the novels that intervene between The Edible Woman and The Robber Bride. More importantly, she grasps the oppressive quality of mapping and acts subversively toward city maps and other maps in the latter novel. Atwood's literal and metaphorical uses of mapped places require some explication, the purpose of this essay. Most particularly, The Robber Bride requires both more contextualization in contemporary thinking about mapping and more ex planation, because in it Atwood subverts mapping as an imaginative construct. This essay will therefore stress both that critical context at its onset and that specific text after it surveys the less subversive uses of mapping in novels from The Edible Woman to Cat's Eye. Theories of Mapping Mapping has recently attracted a great deal of attention--so much so that we cannot, in the few pages we have, survey the many theoretical treatments of it. Instead, we will look at five very different treatments: one that considers mapping literally; two that consider mapping metaphorically but in the very different contexts of technoscience and women's autobiography; and two that consider mapping as an important concern in Canadian literature. Although the five proceed from different assumptions and along different courses, what they say about mapping coalesces into a theoretical position that premises our work on Atwood and especially on The Robber Bride. Rose Gillian's Feminism and Geography (1993) surveys several attempts to reform what she terms the masculinist practice of geography. The subdiscipline of Time Geography acknowledges that there are social spaces beyond the spaces that meet the eye, the ones that geography traditionally privileges. The subdiscipline of Human Geography goes further and tries to incorporate in mappings "broader social power relations" (44). It also rejects scientific rationality, undermines dualism, recovers emotion, and calls for reflexivity by the geographer. Feminist Geography finds much of value in both of these reforms of traditional practice, especially in the latter. Even these reforms, however, privilege the male gaze, one that identifies the land to be mapped with the horizontally reclining female body. Feminist geography, then, must replace this male gaze with a female perspective. That perspective foregrounds networks of interaction. The resulting "feminist maps are multiple and intersecting, and they require...intric ate skills in cartography" (155). Gillian's study deals with the academic practice of geography, and it deals with literal maps. Donna J. Haraway's Modest Witness @ Second Millennium (1997) brings together, as its subtitle notes, Feminism and Technoscience. It deals extensively with maps that are figures but deny their status as such, hiding behind the aura of technoscience. A good example is the human genome project, which claims to offer a map of the human body. Like many other maps, this one seems neutral but, once the figure is recognized as such, it becomes apparent how the illusion of objectivity is used to obscure controversial aspects of the project. Like other projects embarked upon for economic reasons, this project hides those very reasons behind the mapping metaphor. Haraway reproduces and analyzes an advertisement for DNA-cutting enzymes by New England Bio Labs that promotes the project as a whole. The advertisement is titled "Mapping the Human Genome" and it features a nude female draped in a form-fitting map of the world with t he only continent visible being Africa. …

For some years now Canadian literature has been generating immense attention on the international stage. This has been no less true in Great Britain, the erstwhile imperial center, where Canada has been the long-time subject of British fascination. While in the early decades of this century Canadian literature was considered the inferior production of a cultural backwater, from the late 1960s onwards Canadian culture has garnered intense notoriety in Britain. The institutional study of Canadian literature has flourished in Britain since at least the founding of the British Association of Canadian Studies (BACS) in 1975, which eventually established a branch specifically devoted to literature. Under the aegis of commonwealth and later postcolonial literary studies--not to mention Canadian studies specifically--Canadian literary texts have become a fixture in many university courses and programs in the UK. This has been true, as well, in more general circles--such as the various highbrow literary magazines and the popular press--where Canadian fiction has been regularly and widely reviewed.(1) Writers such as Leonard Cohen, Marian Engel, Margaret Laurence, Mordecai Richler, and others received wide attention up into the 1970s, while more recently such figures as Margaret Atwood, Robertson Davies, Alice Munro, Michael Ondaatje, and Carol Shields--aided, of course, by various Booker Prize nominations--have almost become household names. If in a sense Canada has always existed at some sort of fantasy level for British interpreters--as a landscape of pure, untrammeled immensity and possibility--today it is the Canadian social landscape that persists as a location of desire. The "Canada" that emerges from this swirl of popular and academic literary acclaim is a postimperial ideal: a location close enough to the familiar (and perhaps compromised) homeland, yet distant enough historically, to offer an amenable role model--yet another instance of Canada as a vacant space onto which can be projected various fantasies of (post)imperial desire. This takes a variety of forms, including that which I would like to consider in this paper: the figuration of Canada as a welcome postcolonial Eden in clear opposition to an American empire that is offered up as the latest source of global--economic, spiritual, political, environmental--malaise. In this triangular formulation, the willed demonization of the United States enables a convenient externalization of societal ills (and responsibility for them) away from the projecting self. My critique throughout this paper, then, is not a defense of the relentless projects of economic and military imperialism imposed on the global stage by American enterprises; instead, I want to highlight the complicity in these projects of other Western nations such as Canada and Britain. One does not counter imperialist oppression by denying one's involvement in it. Anti-Americanism in discussions of Canada is not a new phenomenon. Surely the expression of Canada's vulnerability to the cultural and economic domination of the United States has for some time been taken as something of a given in Canadian nationalist discourse, and with clear and urgent justification. I want to make my accordance with this sentiment clear at the outset. What is less convincing, however, is the ardent defense of Canada (and things Canadian) as necessarilymorally superior to the gluttonous impulses of American enterprises, the figuration, that is, of Canada as an innocent, noble, and marginalized other in opposition to rampant American individualism and materialism. Coincident with this figuration of the respectively good and evil nations, is the idea of Canada as marked by a more communal ethic over the U.S.'s individualist ethos, which is in turn paralleled by the notorious mosaic versus melting pot figuration of each nation's policy of multiculturalism, a distinction which garners immense lip service both at home and abroad. …

When John Ayre's biography of Northrop Frye was published in 1989, its dustjacket suggested that Frye ought to be considered the foremost figure in Canadian intellectual history. He "has authored," it proclaimed, "three of the most influential books of literary criticism of all time"--Fearful Symmetry (1947), Anatomy of Criticism (1957), and The Great Code (1982). Their influence, it implied, has also made Frye into something more than a literary critic. He has become "the fourth most cited twentieth-century thinker, behind only Freud, Lenin, and Roland Barthes." In short, the dustjacket asserted that because "no critic in any time has produced so impressive a body of work," Frye is now "familiar to generations of writers, intellectuals, and students everywhere." For students of Canada, however, the significance of Frye's achievement is both more elusive and more consequential It is not just a function of his having achieved the "international renown" so heralded on his biography's dustjacket. Because Frye paid considerable attention to Canadian literature and culture throughout his career, he involved himself in a tradition of specifically national discourse. He thus established lines of relation from himself to influential predecessors and successors. His lasting national significance will ultimately be determined by these complex lines of relation, rather than proven by citation statistics. Still, the nature of Frye's elusive Canadian significance is also suggested on Ayre's dustjacket, which metaphorically casts Frye in a central and illuminating role. The metaphor appears in a 1978 quotation from Marshall McLuhan: "Norrie is not struggling for his place in the sun. He is the sun." Though the context in which McLuhan was then centering Frye remains unclear, Frye's history of English-Canadian poetry now places him, like the sun, at the center of a Canadian critical solar system.(1) He attained this position by recreating, and thereby displacing, the history that A. J. M. Smith and John Sutherland fashioned together.(2) Contextual Background During the 1940s--and largely through the agency of such publications as the Canadian Forum and the University of Toronto Quarterly--critical attention turned in a higher degree to the definition of a Canadian tradition in writing. Smith and Sutherland edited anthologies of Canadian poetry, while E. K. Brown published his early critical overview On Canadian Poetry (1943) and, almost immediately, revised it in response to Smith's reaction to what he had written, bringing out a new version in 1944. Reviewing the anthologies that Smith and Sutherland edited during the decade, Frye initially validated many aspects of their work, in which they depict a unified poetry of the present reconciling and surpassing its divided past. But when he turned his attention to English-Canadian poetry of the 1950s, Frye saw those same past divisions being more preserved than resolved in his two predecessors' anthologies and criticism. He then adopted a position similar to that which Smith and Sutherland occupied before him, one from which English-Canadian poetry appears to be prematurely split. Like them, he too sought to exorcise the division. And three decades later, Frye also supplied terms that implicitly characterize his relation to Smith and Sutherland. In an essay entitled "Literary History" (1981), he wrote: "It seems to me that the central conception involved in the historical sequence of literary works is the conception of recreation. A reader recreates everything he reads more or less in his own image.... In all recreation there is a son/father relationship which has a double aspect: an Oedipus relation where the son kills the father and a Christian relation where the son identifies with the father" (225). These terms suggest that Frye, too, re-created in his own image the history that Smith and Sutherland constructed for English-Canadian poetry. In the son/father aspect of his recreation, the Oedipal Frye metaphorically killed his fathers by asserting that a mature literary tradition was established neither by the poets that Smith promoted, nor by those that Sutherland upheld, but rather by their successors in the 1950s. …