Exodus: When Canadian literature moved to New York.
Date
2001
Authors
Mount, Nicholas.
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Dalhousie University
Abstract
Description
Historians have typically located the emergence of a distinctively Canadian literature in the decades after Confederation, especially the 1880s and 1890s. Problematically for this account, however, these were the very decades of the largest emigration ever from Canada to the United States, and with these millions of migrants went between a third and a half of all working Canadian writers. The largest single concentration of these expatriates settled in New York, where they entered into and in several cases established key literary cultures, both collaborative with and resistant to the official culture of the period. As a demographic phenomenon, this extraordinary exodus has been largely erased from Canadian literary history; certain of its participants, however, have since been selectively and silently repatriated as the founders of and models for the Canadian canon. In a sense in which that canon has worked hard to obscure, then, Canadian literature began in late nineteenth-century New York, with one foot planted in the environmental influences of its homeland and the other in the cultural influences of the continental centre. From its earliest articulations, the Canadian canon has sought to emphasise the former influences and suppress the latter, an imbalance the dissertation seeks to explain and correct.
Primarily an account of the causes, main participants, and canonical effects of Canada's literary exodus, the dissertation is also a first step toward theorizing a transnational understanding of literary culture in North America, taking as its focus the moment of the first mass dissemination of that culture, the 1880s and 1890s. In this broader sense, the dissertation is intended to facilitate further inquiry on both sides of the border into continentally rather than nationally defined literary culture in North America, as well as to recover for Canadianists some once well-known but now forgotten exiles. For this latter end, the dissertation includes an appendix (volume 2) containing annotated bibliographies for each of the twenty-six expatriates that form the core of its study.
Thesis (Ph.D.)--Dalhousie University (Canada), 2001.
Primarily an account of the causes, main participants, and canonical effects of Canada's literary exodus, the dissertation is also a first step toward theorizing a transnational understanding of literary culture in North America, taking as its focus the moment of the first mass dissemination of that culture, the 1880s and 1890s. In this broader sense, the dissertation is intended to facilitate further inquiry on both sides of the border into continentally rather than nationally defined literary culture in North America, as well as to recover for Canadianists some once well-known but now forgotten exiles. For this latter end, the dissertation includes an appendix (volume 2) containing annotated bibliographies for each of the twenty-six expatriates that form the core of its study.
Thesis (Ph.D.)--Dalhousie University (Canada), 2001.
Keywords
Literature, Canadian (English).