Areas of Research in Canadian Literature

It is symptomatic of our growing self-confidence that Canadian literature, the very existence of which was seriously debated in academic circles a generation ago, should now be recognized as a legitimate subject of research. Already valuable pioneer work has been done by faculty members and graduate students in several Canadian, and in a few American, universities. Canadian literature remains, however, a very rich and virtually unexploited field. So far, our operations in it may be compared to those of a harvesting machine which merely removes the heads from the grain: we have still to examine the soil in which the seed grew and to investigate the process of growth.