English-Canadian Literary Criticism, 1890-1950: Defining and Establishing a National Literature
Keywords: Canadian Literature
Canadian literary history
Canadian literary criticism

The views of the critics who attempted an explicit definition of Canadian literature between 1890 and 1950 are the main focus of this study. English-Canadian literary criticism (defined here as criticism written in English of Canadian literature written in English or French) was dominated during this period by a theoretical approach that used the concept of nation as a starting point. The approach originated with German Romantic philosophers and critics, notably J.-G. Herder (1744-1829). The ideas of Romantic nationalism spread rapidly through the West as part of the ideology of nationalism, and were firmly established in Canada well before 1890. The central tenet of this theory is that great literature is the expression of the national soul; indeed a great literature is regarded as essential to national self-definition. Canada's lack of such a literature, therefore, was seen as a political, as well as a cultural defect, and as a result, English-Canadian criticism's main project was to establish, against heavy economic and cultural odds, a Canadian literature. Thus, the definition or analysis of Canadian literature came second to setting up the various institutions deemed necessary for its development--literary societies, periodicals, a body of critical and reference works, and university courses. The concerns and ideas derived from Romantic nationalism can be traced, not only through the work of earlier critics such as Archibald Lampman, Wilfred Campbell, Duncan Campbell Scott, John D. Logan, James Cappon, Pelham Edgar, and Archibald MacMechan, but also through later critics such as Ray Palmer Baker, Vernon Rhodenizer, Edward McCourt, Lorne Pierce, William Arthur Deacon, Lionel Stevenson, and E. K. Brown, and finally, to A. J. M. Smith, and most significantly, in view of his influence, to Northrop Frye. The Romantic nationalist critic typically tries to link the literature written in a nation with what are considered distinctive characteristics of that nation--its language, geography, climate, race, history, myth, and folklore. Since Canada has two national languages, and was felt to be lamentably lacking in racial homogeneity, history, folklore, or myth, the Canadian critical focus shifted to those elements of Canada that seemed likely to prove Canada a unified nation distinct from both the United States and Great Britain. The desire to link literature to the land led to some very deterministic models of artistic development. Critics often believed that a writer had an almost biological tie with his birthplace, and that once "uprooted" or "transplanted" he could not write well of another place. Other writers argued that it was not birthplace that was significant, but that the nation where a writer had spent his "impressionable years," his childhood, imprinted itself permanently on his mind, and therefore, on his art. The national spirit moved from the land and the people through the poet, in a model that obviously downplayed such foreign influences as education, reading, and imported cultural conventions. Modern critics still write as if there was an essence of Canada, a national spirit, which, working on a writer's unconscious, manifests itself in Canadian literature. They cite as evidence repeated themes in works widely separated in time and outlook. This "national spirit" is, I argue, simply a learned literary convention, transmitted from Europe, adapted to Canadian needs as well as possible by English-Canadian critics, and adhered to quite closely by those writers who wished to be considered Canadian. Rather than calling this tradition "Canadian Literature," critics might more accurately name it the "national convention."