Why go
A book can make familiar scenery less anonymous. Susanna Moodie and Catherine Parr Traill wrote about settler life, while Hugh MacLennan’s Two Solitudes explores the divide between English and French Canada. Later writers such as Margaret Atwood and Alistair MacLeod show how varied those inherited themes became.
The full story
Early writing in both English and French often dealt with land, settlement and distance from Europe. Those concerns did not produce a single tradition. French-language literature developed in a different linguistic and cultural setting from English-language work, while regional and community histories shaped both. Hugh MacLennan’s Two Solitudes gave a memorable form to tensions between English- and French-speaking Canada. Alistair MacLeod’s No Great Mischief draws on Cape Breton family and place; Margaret Atwood has approached national identity through fiction and poetry. Categories such as “Canadian literature” can help orient a reader, but they also group together voices with different relationships to colonization, migration and language. For a trip, start with the region or subject you are visiting, then branch outward.