-late 1800's

-poems: The Potato Harvest, The Sower, The Herring Weir

-member of Confederation Poets: Nationalist, believed in improving Canadian culture

-Cosmopolitain (interest in all cultures): wrote sonnets (illustrative of international) to best represent traditional rural life

-needed American publication to make money, international focus

-no place names, could take place in US

-The Sower tried to immitate well known french painting

-breaks argument that some landscapes more Canadian

-poems published from late 1920's to 1960's

-political satire & questions; W.L.M.K & Overture

-WLMK: mock-elegy for Mac King; first line formal and rest satirical

-about side of King people didn't know: medium

-criticized evasiveness: real life from king: "conscription if necessary but not necessarily conscription"

-Overture: speaker wonders if should be listennig to classical Mozart with change (fall of Capitalism) outside; written in 4-line stanzas (classical structure) confuses argument

-Canadian authors meet = sexist: Mrs. Crotchet, female author dimunitive, lesser

-male fear of poetry seen as effeminate; modernist reaction against poetry as effeminate

-poems from 1930's - 1960's explored place of women & female sexuality

-Comrade, Bartok & The Geranium, 3 Emilys, The Unquiet Bed

-criticized for writing about female sexuality; Comrade more passive & later poetry more active

-Comrade blends personal & political (comradeship outlasts sexual passion in relationship and relates to communist party)

-unquiet bed: female perspective of heterosexual encounter makes her see her essential self; place of women in society

-3 Emilys: Carr, Bronte, Dickinson; argument against unfullfilled due to never marrying & childless; not sure which is best--more artistic freedom

-Bartok & the Geranium: classic women as passive and light & men as active & dark; not polarized but co-existing; preening-narcissism at end doesn't allow women to triumpf; flower sexual imagery (deflowering in Comrade)

-poltiical novel from early 1900's; young lawyer Lorne Murchison in fictional town of Elgin who advocates imperial preferential trade & unsuccessfully runs for liberal party

-Elgin is fair sample of manufacturing; small city; first form of Canadian Nationalism arose from scheme for imperial federation--Lorne goes to England & recognizes Canada has colonial status; wants to be equal partners

-in speech Lorne argues England is mecha race but novel frequently provides evidence of blending--no language / culture pure; passage about education uses phrase potential melting pot--meaning it has things in common with America; Wheelers coins (some American)--friends of Murchisons shop across border; talks to bus driver in UK, assumes American

-Milburns get attitude they are are snobs / pretention for talking with British accent (less sympathetic because conservative) 

-not everyone's nationalism: Lorne ideas mean significant loss of Canadian sovereignty; hateful stereotypes; metaphor of America as prostitute--letting everyone in

-Lorne hypocrite goes to America in end; First Nations - actual Loyalists

-alegory: Lorne representative of young country; Duncan recognizes competition for different interests within & between parties

-Imperialist doesn't take sides; both Torries & Liberals corrupt at end & novel resists ease of taking sides in small town

-recognizes her own bias (more sympathetic towards liberal) while representing multiple view points

-escaped Germany for fraud; Lazybones written in 1920s (short story)

-woman protag. more sympathetic than male character; only see through Elizabeth's eyes; don't know why Walt is lazy, she does what she needs to survive

-landscape symbolically manipulated by prarie realist to represent thoughts of characters; cahracter's aren't what they are due to the environment; landscape indifferent (opposite of Atwood / Frye)

-her life struggle gives her meaning

-not told her thoughts, just that she is thinking: at the end of the day, she knew contentment (similar to Potato Harvest, Roberts)

Sinclair Ross

-something more profound than farm life story; wife sees stoic farmer weep when he's alone with animals; she dare not confront him about it because she needs him to be strong

-Field of Wheat; from -35; marriage real trouble of story

-he didnt insure the field so the problem is his, not nature

-free indirect discourse: narrative voice a blend of her (Marth's) words and a distant narration: sentence beginning: "he was a fool for work, john"

-poems Autobiographical, Lone Bather, Heirloom, Montreal (40s)

-cosmopoltain nationalism: spokeman of internation jewish community & saw similairies to french-Canadian situation; minorities with  distinct culture & solidarity

-heirloom: elegy to father; left no wealth / land but tradition/culture/faith in books; reference to Zodiac--hebrew books not illustrated but for images of Zodiac; about pathos--feelings of son about father's death

-autobiographical: passing of youth (nostaglia--Wrodworthian)

-Montreal: biligual poem, as in Montreal people switch langagues, single minded--only of beauty of Montreal (diff. from Richler)

-1930's novel of city experiencing hardships of great depression when Father Stephen Dowling, young preist is searching for meaning of god's love; helps two young prostitutes, Ronnie & Midge, such as giving them money & clothes & helping them find jobs; dowling becomes increasingly involved in their lives & his actions condemned by rich & church; fails to help them when they go to court be becomes grief stricken and sent in asylum where he has moment of clarity, realizing his pure Chrisitan love for the girls

-Callaghan hostile to idea of Canadian nationalist; thinks good writing should have nothing to do with Canada; set it Toronto but not said explicitly; Catholic issues are not uniquely Canadian

-relationship between religion and sex: Callaghan's epigraph from Song of Songs (sexual metaphor for God's love); resemblance between human love and divine love; core issue of novel is if man gives all possessions for his love of god he will be condemned

-Dowling feels confusion and shame over both helping and not helping them; screw up when he doesn't ask his order what to do (doesn't want to be told it's wrong, knows it might be)

-characters not allegorical embodiments of ideas but flawed human characters

-Dowling sees reversal of expectations; link prostitution to luxury but sees it is really poverty

-normal man with normal sexual drives; Foley can't confess, understands delimna

-short story david (40s): Birney attempting to be regional (BC) not national; strong descriptions of Western Can. landscapes

-summer bob/david delight in freedom from work; full of youthful confidence, no obstacle is too great--pushes David off cliff after paralyzed for life

-interests critics who believe in terror inspired by Canadian landscape but full of personification & projection; many instances of pathetic fallacy; inanimate rock beckons them because see it as challenge; terror caused by their actions, not nature

-"surging bloom of incredible dawn": not neutral description

-saying landscape murders evades what happens in the poem: about bob's guilt--second half of peom nature infused with bob's guilt

-1940s poetry: stenographers, ladylady, permanent tourist, photos of the salt mine, after rain; modern poetry--uses strong metaphorical imagery

-stenographer = typist; critical of, vs celebrating, womens employment in war years; neither for/against feminist struggle but pain of activity; war = dominant imager: deadening routine like march; women part of envrionment--mechanized

-landlady: lady, not lord, is oppressive force (gender never simple--Bodily Harm); authority doesn't win & undercuts landlady; doesn't have as much power as she thinks & left frustrated w. no life, vicariously, pathetic to find out more

-permanent tourist: mockery, another form of empire; say want contact with culture but never leave inn; dog vision--colourless, state of absurdity, never arriving

-Salt Mine: innocence & experience filters; partial and desire to transcend; darker as salt washes off but not black and white (no innocent in youth, experience can be good)

-after rain: page more interested in garden than bush gardens; disatisfied with own role of observer who takes delight in ruined garden; thinks beautiful and then wonders how she can take delight in it; criticizes herself and continues to do it; wants something more from poetry

-used common vernacular in poems from 1960's-2000; movement towards accessbility; Canadian issues mattered but cosmopolitain nationalist (60s poems)

-country north of belleville: part of long traditional of topographical poetry; poems set in particular landscape; poem about remembered landscape; meditative memory issues

-purdy speaks in collective voice in return poem: collective 'we' & can be regional or national

-nationalist but not chest-beating:country of defeat & loss, landscape close to ruin not power

-poem tribute to farming figures: sense of beauty/dignity; rolling stanzas like furl in field and meandering ambivalence like meandering rural roads

-wilderness gothic: more obinous Durer landscale (regional, so not specifically Canadian) & landscape common with other gothic settings

-mythopoeia (creating myth); assigns to workman the concerns of the poet

-Purdy goes for things landscape has in common with northern renaissance not Ontario in past; difference between past & present blurred; poem saturated with fearful associations (omens, supersitutions)

-1970s poems with environmental concerns & perceptions of nature using self-mockery/irony not to sound preachy

-settings close to home, not a frightneing wilderness but any nature that elludes humans (yard); honour close to home as much as far away

-Frige Nocturn: irony allusions because pome now sombre but witty/playful; outrageous metaphors (sleep off somewhere tinkering with motocycle)

-adagio for a fallen sparrow: slow piece of music (title suggests elegy); poetry of wit; sparrow burn bright reference to Blake; comic apostrophe at end

-winter solstice moon: en ecologue: theme is home whixh he situates between himself and other; resisting appropriation: houses without people, what sun gives light moon takes away & mocks: attempts to appropriate

-1959 novel about outspoken, flawed, almost heroic boy Duddy Kravitz, believable because Richler takes no sides; satire is there but restrained (character not caricatures); richler attacks group identities on all fronts larger than family (Canadian, Jewish, Provincial); criticizes what he is involved with

-Opening para. critical of class, ethnicity, curriculum & pedagogy; students try to break McPherson as he can't relate to them (Duddy just doing what they were but feels guilty forever for inadvertently causing wife death

-Macpherson feels relief when wife dies who he once loved; last words to Duddy: "You'll go far, Kravitz"; reach ironic status in novel as he both achieves and loses everything; novel has ambivalent perspective

-everyone in society thinks the worst of Duddy & favor Lenny but some come around: Benji & Cohen

- Duddy something to both admire & dispise

-novel has simplistically elegant plot: Duddy understands "a man w.out land is nobody" literally and ultimately disappoints grandfather

-Duddy internalizes story about boy wonder--one of the last things is Max telling of Duddy's exploits in similar fashion