Introduction

Abstract

This book is designed to chart significant changes that have taken place in Canada’s literary profile since the early 1990s, as it is figured through women’s fiction written in English. As a reader and critic working outside Canada, I have been impressed by two remarkable phenomena during this period. One is the increasingly familiar presence of Canadian women’s fiction on international publishers’ lists together with the high visibility of Canadian women writers as winners of international literary prizes, and the other is the substantially growing number of novels by women from diverse ethnic and racial backgrounds, who make the traditional image of “white” Canada look rather outdated. Clearly, the concept of Canadianness has changed, and it is in response to these changes that I want to explore how women’s voices contribute to some of the issues within Canadian debates about identity. I shall consider how some significant contemporary novels written by women from a variety of ethnocultural perspectives refigure the nation and questions of national identity, opening up spaces for a revised rhetoric of Canadianness. Of course national affiliation is only one component of identity construction, and indeed it may not always be the most crucial in comparison with other identificatory markers like race and ethnicity, gender and sexuality, or education and social class.