Beyond the Provinces: Literary Canada at Century's End

Patricia Morley is professor emerita of English and Canadian studies at
Concordia University, and the author of Kurlek, Margaret Laurence: The
Long Journey Home, and As Though Life Mattered: Leo Kennedy’s Story.

The three essays reproduced in this volume were originally presented as
the Priestley Lectures in the History of Ideas at the University of
Toronto in 1994.

The first lecture, “The Old Countries Recede,” charts the emergence
of a sense of nationalism in Canadian literature, beginning in 1858 with
Thomas D’Arcy McGee and moving through what Staines calls “the
colonial voices” of Ralph Connor, Lucy Maud Montgomery, Stephen
Leacock, and Hugh MacLennan. “The Dispassionate Witness” addresses
Canada’s sense of separation from the United States, thanks in part to
Canadian broadcasting. It also examines the American literary sense of
Canada, or lack thereof. By the mid-1980s, Staines observes, Canadian
works such as Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale were depicting
the United States as a fundamentalist dystopia, while Canada had
discovered “its path to literary selfhood within North America.” The
third lecture deals with Canadian criticism. Here Staines rejects
thematic criticism as simplistic, praises postmodernism, and concludes
that Canadian literature is “a balancing of voices in a global village
whose citizens and their works are at once native and naturalized.”

One could take issue with many of these positions, but Staines argues
his case well, providing a host of scholarly references. His ideas owe
much to his original teachers, F.E.L. Priestley and Northrop Frye.