Canadian fiction rose from obscurity to global acclaim, scholar says

Canadian fiction has transformed from a niche interest into a globally recognized force over the past five decades, according to a scholar who witnessed its evolution.

David Staines, a professor and literary critic, recounted in a recent lecture how Canadian literature was once actively avoided.

"Whenever I go into the library and see a maple leaf on the side of a book, that means I avoid it because it is Canadian," Staines recalled his cousin, a PhD in the sciences, telling him in 1976.

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When he moved to the University of Ottawa in 1978, a senior colleague scolded him, calling him a member of the "Maple Leaf mafia."

In 1982, a conversation with a prominent Swedish publisher, Per Gedin, highlighted Canada's international literary anonymity.

Gedin explained that while his agents once scouted New York and London, they now also looked to Australia, South Africa and Canada.

He said Australia gained notice after Patrick White won the Nobel Prize, and South Africa had the compelling context of apartheid.

Canada, however, had won no major awards, had no history of intense warfare or major internal breakups, and its literary achievements might escape the world's notice, Gedin reflected.

"Canada, therefore, had no defining interest to the outside world," Staines said, summarizing Gedin's view.

"It was a safe place for fiction to grow and develop without the steady gaze of the outside world."

Since that conversation 45 years ago, Canadian writers have claimed the world's top literary honours.

Margaret Atwood has won the Booker Prize twice, in 2000 for The Blind Assassin and in 2019 for The Testaments, and was a finalist three other times.

Alice Munro won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013 for her body of work.

Michael Ondaatje won the Golden Man Booker Prize for The English Patient as the best of the first 51 Booker winners.

Staines noted Canada has not suffered the ravages of external wars or internal devastations that often define a nation's story.

He pointed to the immense wealth and quality of Canadian fiction, and then highlighted some of the negative forces that have undercut its recognition.

He cited the long gap in Indigenous fiction after the death of writer Pauline Johnson in 1913.

Johnson's optimistic stories about Native-White coexistence, like "A Red Girl's Reasoning" from 1893, fell on deaf ears, Staines said.

Her death coincided with the appointment of Duncan Campbell Scott as head of Indian Affairs, an advocate for assimilation.

Sixty years passed before another Indigenous writer was published in Canada, with Maria Campbell's Halfbreed in 1973.

Since then, many Indigenous fiction writers have followed, including the late Richard Wagamese.

In his novel Medicine Walk, an Ojibway teenager helps his dying father reach a burial site in the British Columbian interior.

"Wagamese writes with deep compassion of the trials and the sufferings of the Ojibway people, reaching out to the love that ultimately connects them and highlighting the healing power of family, of tradition, and of the landscape that engulfs them," Staines said.

A more recent writer is Métis poet Katherena Vermette, whose first novel, The Break, became a national bestseller.

Staines delivered the remarks in a keynote address marking 50 years of Canadian studies at Universität Trier in Germany, where he was awarded an honorary degree in May.

With files from National Post