Canadian Short Story

Canadian Short Story Nature writing

Beginnings Haliburton, The Clock-Maker: - the stories of Sam Slick - the Yankee against the Nova Scotian - characters at the margins of two cultures  The Strickland sisters: - Susanna Moodie’s “A Visit to Grosse Isle” and “Brian, the Still-Hunter” - the effect of fiction - a dominant voice throughout the 19th c. - The Journals of Susanna Moodie, 1970 Margaret Atwood 

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The Confederation Years 

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The pull of the US market Colourful characters: Metis, Mounties, Natives The lure of the North: - romantic tales of adventure - provincial stereotypes

Mistic Creek, Brenda Schmidt 3

Modernism 

Stephen Leacock: Literary Lapses, 1910 Sunshine Sketches of a Little town 1912 Arcadian Adventures of the Idle Rich 1914 - created the mythic town of Mariposa - created an indicative English Canadian form: the short-story cycle

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The Short-Story Cycle D.C. Scott, In the Village of Viger, 1896  Stephen Leacock  J. G. Sime, Sister Women, 1919  F. P. Grove, Over Prairie Trails, 1922  Emily Carr, Klee Wyck, 1941  George Elliott, The Kissing Man 1962  Alice Munro Who Do You Think You Are? 1978 

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The Small Town Setting Serene, nostalgic settings  Gentle, ironic humor, lampooning  Simple, sentimental attachment of the characters to their place 

Lunenburg, a famous small historic town on the south shore of Nova Scotia 6

D.C. Scott’s In the Village of Viger  Anticipation

of: - the stark loneliness of Joyce’s characters in Dubliners 1914 - Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio 1919 - Hemingway’s In Our Time 1924

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Morley Callaghan 1903-1990  Part

of the Bohemian circles in Paris in the 1920s  Tapping of the rich possibilities of foreign markets  That Summer in Paris 1963

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Morley Callaghan  “A

member of another nation and civilization” because he dealt too little with identifiable Canadian details  Recognized the postcolonial cultural position of English Canada  Recognized the need to focus on Canadian life itself

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Morley Callaghan A

Native Argosy 1929: - spare, laconic prose - moralistic, Catholic themes - vague, North American rather than Canadian settings

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Anthologies of Canadian Stories  Robert

Weaver edited five volumes of Canadian stories from Oxford University Press through the 1950s and 1960s  In the Second Series 1968 included: Hugh garner, Mavis Gallant, Margaret Laurence, Mordecai Richler, Hugh Wood, Alice Munro, Dave Godfrey

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Anthologies of Canadian Stories  John

Metcalf, Sixteen by Twelve 1970, The Narrative Voice 1972  Mordecai Richler, Canadian Writing Today, 1970s  To bring the short story to the classroom 12

Mavis Gallant 1922 

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An expatriate in Paris Lives as a foreigner in another culture In the 1960s almost all her stories appeared first in the New Yorker From 1970s – a renaissance in Canada

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Alice Munro 1931 Dance of the Happy Shade, 1968  Lives of Girls and Women, 1971  Something I’ve been Meaning to Tell You, 1974  Selected Stories, 1996  The Love of a Good Woman, 1998 

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Nature-writing  Canadian

nature as physical challenge  Doubting the adequacy of the human point of view as a “central focalizing device”  Critical models of Canadian identity: - Northrop Frye’s “garrison mentality” - Margaret Atwood’s “survival” - Robert Kroetsch’s “disunity as unity” - Frank Davey’s Canada as a “site of social contestation” 15

Nature-writing  Remained

anthropocentric rather than

ecocentric  Focused not on the environment but on its human inhabitants  Striking limitation given the rather marginal presence of humans in such a vast territory  Nature-writing as a specifically Us preoccupation 16

Nature-writing in the 18th and 19th Centuries  The

exploration narratives of 18th century: - emphasis on vast spaces - personal darings  The settler narratives of early 19th century: - local knowledge - mocking of human endeavors

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Nature-writing

Delos White Beadle, Canadian Fruit, Flower, and Kitchen Garden, 1872

Birds of Ontario, Thomas McIlwraith,

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Nature-writing: telling stories Earnest Thompson Seton’s animal stories - humanized characters - inspired others  Charles G.D. Roberts’s animal stories  Archibald Stansfeld Belaney, Grey Owl; - faked his own life - elegiac lament for lost harmony - autobiographical tale of self-discovery 

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Modern versions Farley Mowat’s Never Cry Wolf, 1963 – the best-known modern version of the genre - a parable about the human desire to identify with and yet separate oneself from the animals  Sharon Butala’a The Perfection of the Morning, 1994: nature and human psyche  Mark Hume’s River of the Angry Moon, 1998: critique of the damage humans do to ancient ecosystems 

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