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The Columbia History of the American NovelAnother avenue to effective fiction, and one seen in both Canadian Westerns and "Easterns," was to make novels out of the very impediments to their production — a limited audience, a "colonial cringe" mentality that denigrated anything Canadian, traditions (both English and French) of distrusting and/or censoring literature. Moreover, the paradigmatic story of the country well might be its reluctance to sanction any official story. "Canadian literature," Kroetsch has claimed, "is the autobiography of a culture that insists it will not tell its story." Or as Sam Solecki has observed, "No other established literature treats national identity as a question." No wonder a number of novels are oblique and paradoxical narratives that tell of not telling, or that "the paralyzed artist" — one of Margaret Atwood's chapter titles in Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature — is a common Canadian protagonist. In Sinclair Ross's As For Me and My House (1949), for example, Philip Bentley's failure to be an artist is so pervasive that even the recounting of it must be turned over to his wife ...» |
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