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Article Excerpt
Literary critics have long been in the business of defining literary eras. Often the task is to organize national literatures into manageable segments, providing readers with landmarks for what might otherwise seem like a sea of narrative. This categorization usually involves making the literature understandable according to larger national stories. British literature, for example, evolved into categories the Renaissance, the Romantic Period, the Victorian Period, the Modern Period, to name a few--defined by time periods that are now widely accepted, although the exact dates may still vary from critic to critic (Abrams 1988, 134 135). American literature is organized around wars relevant to the definition of the country (the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, World War I, World War II). American literary critic Meyer Abrams suggests that what does not fit into the larger national story is often downloaded into subcategories, "some [of which] name a time span or a form of political organization, others a prominent intellectual or imaginative mode, and others still a predominant form of literature" (1988, 130). Canadian literature has not yet been the subject of intensive debate about categorization, in part because it has only recently, by comparison, been packaged as a national literature at all. To complicate matters, English, American, and Canadian national stories share overarching political events such as World War I and World War II, as well as overlapping critical concepts and generic histories associated with the development of the English language. Nevertheless, one would expect Canada's literary categories to differ according to the country's unique and important national moments, just as other national literatures differ according to theirs. I suggest that one of these moments is captured in the time span of 1965-1980. This era is uniquely important to Canadian literature because widespread changes in political understandings of national and female identities contextualized the appreciation of literature published during this time.
As will be detailed, identity politics in this era was made up of two dominant social movements--Canadian nationalism and second-wave feminism--that prompted Canadians and women to think of themselves differently. For example, a wider range of Canadians committed to their national cultural autonomy found economic issues important. Historian Sylvia Bashevkin reports that "Gallup surveys show that approximately 7 1 per cent of Canadians in 1975 believed that the country had enough US investment, compared with a level of 52 per cent in 1961" (1991, 24). Similarly, the second-wave feminist movement, typically described as "a highly visible proliferation of women's organizations that mobilized an unprecedented range and number of women," politicized issues arising from the idea that women were being denied autonomy in a sexist society (Prentice el. al. 1996, 414). That these two movements came together at the same place among the same people contributes vitally to the ways Canadian and female fictional characters were understood at this time.
Any attempt at literary periodization invites the question of why we need a category at all. Certainly an arbitrary span of years should be seen according to some special coherence only if it can pay its own freight in the currency of adding something important to understanding that literature. After all, people living at a particular time do not necessarily know that they are living in a defining era, much less when that period might begin or end. There is no suggestion here that this claim of coherence in the years 1965-1980 is either encompassingly descriptive or prescriptive of the literature that should be studied. Instead, it is a conclusion drawn from what was important to a majority of people in a national context at a certain time, and is meant to generate rather than conclude debate and discussion.
My argument suggests that the most salient aspect of the 1965-1980 era was located in the political and social Zeitgeist regarding identity, and not in the literature itself Cultural theorist Imre Szeman observes that "in Canada the concept of the nation is articulated differently within literary criticism than within literature," and that "in Canada (the nation] can be seen as emerging pre-eminently as a strategy of reading" (2003, 164). Although writers are citizens and are therefore affected by the issues of their times, 1 presume they choose to respond to their times for not) but do not strategically write to conform to a literary era, For example, I assume writers did not begin writing differently because Queen Victoria ascended to the throne, or change their style again when she died. What changed was the world in which the writers worked, the social context that understood cultural products, rather than the literature itself, although the literature no doubt evolved and changed in a number of ways throughout that period. I suggest the same in this time period in Canada, and thus my focus is trained on what people tended to think at the time about the literature or about issues that had nothing directly to do with the literature but nevertheless had an impact on how the literature was understood and valued. In essence, an era is an era if "everybody" thinks it is, so my locus is on what ''everybody" thinks.
Thus, rather than presenting the literature itself in this article, or positing a qualitative change in the literature published at this lime. I focus on what people of the political, literary, and social world thought about their times, and what they understood as the relationship of those times to cultural products produced in those years. The point is to argue that literature during this era was understood and valued for representations of female and national identity, because those issues dominated public discourse at the time. While it is not unusual to understand this era according to the Canadian nationalist movement and its concerns about national identity or the second-wave feminist movement and its concerns with female identity, it is unusual to define this era according to the fact that these two movements and understandings of identity occurred together. However, since they were the two dominant social movements of the era, it seems only logical to consider them together, especially since I suggest that their simultaneous occurrence was unique to the Canadian experience and linked directly to reception of literature published during that time.
The larger political story informs the understanding of this literature because people of this era used cultural products (primarily fiction) actively, defining for themselves what they understood female and national identity to mean at a time when these issues seemed particularly important. It also explains why the same fiction can be read differently in different eras. As Wolfgang Iser points out, the active participation of the reader is a process that includes "both the pre structuring of the potential meaning by the text, and the reader's actualization of this potential through the reading process ... which will vary historically from one age to another" (1974, xii). In other words, the focus here is on the political, social, and literary circumstances that conditioned the literature produced and, in turn, contributed to understandings and valuations of literature at this time.
Identity
Already in historical and critical writing about Canada, there are ubiquitous references to the sixties and seventies. The feel-good-about-being-Canadian brand of national identity contributed to what Tom Nairn, theorist of nationalism and globalization, suggests nationalisms of all stripes do when calling on their members: "(They offer a correspondence] to certain...
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