Title: When Canadian literature moved to New York
First published: 2005
Description: "Canadian literature began not in the backwoods of Ontario or the salt flats of New Brunswick, but in the cafes, publishing offices, and boarding houses of late nineteenth-century New York, where writing developed as a profession and where the groundwork for the Canadian canon was laid. So argues Nick Mount in When Canadian Literature Moved to New York." "The last decades of the nineteenth century saw an extraordinary exodus from English Canada, draining the country of half its writers and all but a few of its literary celebrities. Motivated by powerful obstacles to a domestic literature, most of these migrants landed in New York - by the 1890s the centre of the continental literary market - and found for the first time a large, receptive audience and recognition from non-Canadian publishers and reviewers." "Although the expatriates of the 1880s and 1890s - including Bliss Carman, Ernest Thompson Seton, and Palmer Cox - were recognized for their achievements in Canada, the domestic literature they themselves spurred into existence rekindled a nationalist imperative to distinguish Canadian writing from other literatures, especially American. Thought to lack the 'spirit of the soil, ' most of the work of these writers was slowly eliminated from the emerging English Canadian canon. When Canadian Literature Moved to New York is the story of these expatriate writers: who they were, why they left, what they achieved, and how they changed Canadian literary history."--Jacket.
Subjects: Authors, Canadian, Canadian Authors, Canadian literature, Histoire, Histoire et critique, History, History and criticism, Literature canadienne-anglaise, Littérature canadienne, Publishing, Écrivains canadiens, Édition, General, Edition, American, LITERARY CRITICISM, Litterature canadienne, Ecrivains canadiens, Litterature canadienne-anglaise, Canadian literature, history and criticism
Places: New York, New York (State), New York (État), United States, États-Unis
Time periods: 19e siècle, 19th century
LC classification: PR9189.5 .M68 2005