Canadian Literature in English

W. J. Keith has enhanced and complemented his Canadian Literature in English, originally published in 1985, with a substantial update, and with what he calls a `Polemical Conclusion' -- a stimulating and provocative argument about the quality and direction of Canadian literature. His final sentence is a call to arms: `The realm of literature needs to be won back from the sociological, the ideological, and the politically approved, and restored to the human spirit of delight,...
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W. J. Keith has enhanced and complemented his Canadian Literature in English, originally published in 1985, with a substantial update, and with what he calls a `Polemical Conclusion' -- a stimulating and provocative argument about the quality and direction of Canadian literature. His final sentence is a call to arms: `The realm of literature needs to be won back from the sociological, the ideological, and the politically approved, and restored to the human spirit of delight, originality, imagination and, above all, the love of what can be achieved through verbal sensitivity and dexterity.'

Those who love literature, and especially fans of our national brand, will appreciate the insights provided by Keith about our earliest writers -- the ones we did not tend to encounter in academia or in the bookstores. The travel writings of Hearne and Mackenzie and Thompson ... `helped indirectly but palpably to initiate a Canadian literary tradition'. His comparison of the writing of the pioneer sisters, Catharine Parr Trail and Susanna Moodie is memorable. Of Trail's work, he writes, `Her book is packed full of information and shrewd commentary, but the controlling factor is always the calm, attractive, interesting because always interested, personality of the writer'. Of Moodie he says `Stylistically she is often rough or crude, her reasoning often conventional and trite', and again, `Indeed, while reading Moodie we frequently receive painful glimpses of a mind at the end of its tether'. Yet Keith finally concludes that Moodie's `lack of polish seems right and she was able to maintain a precarious balance between the cogent and the absurd that reflected something in her environment that her sister's more disciplined literary gifts were unable to catch.'

Keith is forthright in owning to subjectivity in his analyses and evaluations. He can be provocative, as when, in his preface to the second edition, he argues that `although a considerable number of younger writers have appeared on the scene, few have displayed unequivocal claims to major status. The flowering that began to manifest itself in the middle of the twentieth century had run its course by the beginning of the new millennium.'