Canadian Prose Literature

Canada has prose literature in many languages. The two most important are the two official languages, English and French. In the western portion of the province of Québec, in northern and eastern Ontario, in the regions of the Maritime provinces called Acadia, and in isolated spots across the country the two cultures that arise from this division are in constant contact. In the rest of the country they are not. This division of the one culture from the other has been called, in a phrase derived from the writing of Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke and a successful novel by the English-speaking novelist Hugh Maclennan, the two solitudes.

In this essay I call French language publications in Canada, even if separatist, French Canadian. (The most obvious alternative term, Québécois, would imply that they were published in Quebec, which, in fact, might not be true.) And, whenever the publication was published in the English language, I call it English Canadian, even though this may be a bit misleading.

So the prose literature of Canada divides, as I see it, into French Canadian, English Canadian, and Other.

Earliest Writings

First Nations peoples left many paintings on rocks in the Canadian Shield. Unlike Egyptian hieroglyphs, most of the images in these paintings are probably not intended to symbolize sounds or syllable. Neither do the paintings obviously relate narratives. No one alive today seems able to "read" them. So they do not seem to be writing in an ordinary sense. We will therefore move on without considering them further.

So the earliest real writings we know of were those of European explorers. They left journals and accounts of their discoveries, beginning in the late 1500s, which are still fascinating today. Some are very well written. Many have been published and exist in libraries; a few remain only in the National Archives in Ottawa.

Since it was the French who were the earliest successful colonial power in Canada, it is to the French explorers and missionaries that we now turn.

Early French Explorers and Missionaries

[To Be Continued and Revised]

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Last modified: 4:57 PM EDT 6/5/2001