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Canada
English-Speaking Canada
Alexandra WestBackgroundChildren’s literature in English-speaking Canada parallels, though it does not always
mirror, the cultural development of Canada from a colony to the post-confederation
nation which celebrated its centennial year in 1967. Canada’s early dependence on
British and American culture, and the struggle to waken from a long post-colonial sleep
and to achieve a composite national character reflecting the multi-ethnic nature of
Canada’s population, are well demonstrated in English-language Canadian children’s
literature.
The title of the first Canadian children’s book, Catharine Parr Traill’s settler survival
tale, The Canadian Crusoes: A Tale of the Rice Lake Plains (1852) intertextually linked
Canada with Robinson Crusoe’s island domain and thus linguistically asserted its
colonised status. Scotsman R.M.Ballantyne’s Snowflakes and Sunbeams; or, The Young
Fur Traders (1856) helped to invent Canada’s north as an exotic literary landscape for
generations of British schoolboy readers of adventure books, reflecting an Occidentalism
no less problematic than the Orientalism common elsewhere. Certainly, from the 1850s,
Canadian children’s literature has made some advances in developing its national
character. For instance, between the 1890s and the 1920s, Sir Charles G.D.Roberts,
Ernest Thompson Seton and L.M.Montgomery produced, among their other work, three
still-famous Canadian children’s books: Red Fox (1905), The Biography of a Grizzly
(1900) and Anne of Green Gables (1908). Nevertheless, though many Canadian books for
children have been written, very few of those written before 1967 have survived as
classics, though Farley Mowat’s Lost in the Barrens (1956) and James Houston’s
Tikta’liktak (1965) rightly occupy places of honour with Canadian readers at least.
After 1967, however, Canadian children’s literature in English has reflected the
significant expansion of Canadian adult literature in English and has helped to educate
readers into an awareness of Canada’s complex cultural identity which is trying to
honour equally its aboriginal peoples, its new immigrants and its European and Asian
forebears. In the past twenty years, Canadian educators have tried to increase the
numbers of home-grown school texts and to expand students’ experience of Canadian