Canadian literature untold narratives essay

As the critic Northrop Frye observed, Canadian literature is haunted by the overriding question “Where is here?”; thus, metaphoric mappings of peoples and places became central to the evolution of the Canadian literary imagination. The earliest documents were unadorned narratives of travel and exploration.

Facts Matter. Support the truth and unlock all of Britannica’s content. Halifax, in the colony of Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick’s Fredericton were the scenes of the earliest literary flowering in Canada. The first literary journal, the Nova-Scotia Magazine, was published in Halifax in 1789.

Most of the earliest poems were patriotic songs and hymns ( The Loyal Verses of Joseph Stansbury and Doctor Jonathan Odell, 1860) or topographical narratives, reflecting the first visitors’ concern with discovering and naming the new land and its inhabitants.

In 1838 Anna Jameson published Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada, an account of her travels in the New World. Frances Brooke, the wife of a visiting British military chaplain in the conquered French garrison of Quebec, wrote the first published novel with a Canadian setting.