Robert Lecker explores the ways in which these anthologies contributed to the formation of a Canadian literary canon, the extent to which this canon was tied to an ideal of English-Canadian nationalism, and the material conditions accounting for the anthologies' production.

This original contribution to hemispheric American literary studies comprises readings of three important novels from Mexico, Canada, and the United States: Carlos Fuentes’s Terra Nostra, Quebecois writer Jacques Poulin’s Volkswagen Blues, and Native American writer Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead. The encyclopedic novel has particular generic characteristics that serve these writers as a vehicle for the reincorporation of hemispheric histories. Starting with an examination of Moby-Dick as precursor, Barrenechea shows how this narrative genre allows Fuentes, Poulin, and Silko to reflect the interconnected world of today, as well as to dramatize indigenous and colonial values in their narratives. His close attention to written documents, visual representations, and oral traditions in these encyclopedic novels sheds light on their comparative cultural relations and the New World from pole to pole. This study amplifies the scope of “America” across cultures and languages, time and tradition.

Canadian literature was born in New York City. It began not in the backwoods of Ontario or the salt flats of New Brunswick, but in the cafés, 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 contemporary and future 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 literary market and recognition from non-Canadian publishers and reviewers. While 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, and this slowly eliminated most of their work 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.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Irish writers played a key role in transatlantic cultural conversations – among Canada, Britain, France, America, and Indigenous nations – that shaped Canadian nationalism. Nationalism in Ireland was likewise influenced by the literary works of Irish migrants and visitors to Canada. Canada to Ireland explores the poetry and prose of twelve Irish writers and nationalists in Canada between 1788 and 1900, including Thomas Moore, Adam Kidd, Lord Edward Fitzgerald, Thomas D’Arcy McGee, James McCarroll, Nicholas Flood Davin, and Isabella Valancy Crawford. Many of these writers were involved in Irish political causes, including those of the Patriots, the United Irish, Emancipation, Repeal, and Young Ireland, and their work explores the similar ways in which nationalists in Ireland and Indigenous and settler communities in Canada retained their cultural identities and sought autonomy from Britain. Initially writing for an audience in Ireland, they highlighted features of the landscape and culture that they regarded as distinctively Canadian and that were later invoked as powerful unifying symbols by Canadian nationalists. Michele Holmgren shows how these Irish writers and movements are essential to understanding the tenor of early Canadian literary nationalism and political debates concerning Confederation, imperial unity, and western expansion. Canada to Ireland convincingly demonstrates that Canadian cultural nationalism left its mark on both countries. Contemporary decolonization movements in Canada and current cultural exchanges between Ireland and Indigenous peoples make this a timely and relevant study.

Includes titles on all subjects, some in foreign languages, later incorporated into Memorial Library.

Are Canadians so influenced by the United States that they lack a distinct identity? This question has preoccupied Canadians and Canadianists for years. Canada - An American Nation? is a compilation of Allan Smith's essays on the influence of American society on Canadian identity. Based on the notion that Canada can best be understood if viewed in relation to the United States, the book explores the ways in which American influences have challenged Canada's cultural independence and asks whether Canada has maintained its own identity.