Reporters: literature to 1867

Abstract

Tracing Canadian literature from the beginnings through to 1867 requires the reader to think along two political planes: one observing writers sequentially against a set of events, the other observing written works as formal embodiments of separate attitudes and expectations. The terminus date 1867 illustrates the distinction; it is a year not of great publications but of political Confederation — an event which would not immediately transform literature but which would entirely change the political context within which colonial and subsequently Canadian writers wrote. Before 1867 there was no Canadian nation. There were outposts and colonies instead, and the distance of these places and the people in them from the centres of empire to which they felt connected left its mark upon their writing. Many literary efforts were formal imitations; whether able or amateur, they reflected what was understood to be (or at least to have been) fashionable elsewhere — in Paris, London, or later Boston and Philadelphia. Some were expressions of exile — songs, plaints, descriptions of loss. The dominant literary forms of the period were loosely reportorial in mode — journals, letters, chronicles, documentary records — all of them designed to send impressions from the edge of civilisation to an authority who stayed back home.