Moveable Margins

Canadian literature continues to be something of a muddle, largely because any homogenizing grid would fail to embrace its divergent tendencies and characteristics. The essays in this book focus on how recent writing addresses notions of multiplicity, and how ideas of space and landcape complement and intersect within this genre. Each province, for example, brings to literature its distinctiveness, created by the specificities of its history and its populations and the contours of its landscape. Writers who have immigrated to Canada move away from the local to remembered and imagined landscapes, and the communities they project are at once familiar and distant, new and old. The authors represented here are all Canadians, by birth or by choice, but the worlds of their imagination are widely disparate. This collection is intended to bring out the differences, and in the process perceive the intersections and draw connections. The motifs that run through all the essays are community, space, and landscape, and they become the touchstones to examine a richly diverse body of recent Canadian writing.