Canada

Abstract

The novel in Canada has developed formally and thematically in relation to changing conceptions of the Canadian identity. From popular romances written in English and French, which dominated literary production in the mid‐eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to subgenres of literary romance and realism that proliferated in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the novel's changing structures and themes reflect the variously imperial, bicultural, regionalist, and pluralist conceptions of Canada that have comprised the nation's complex cultural and political life since the publication of the first Canadian novel, Frances Brooke's The History of Emily Montague (1769). Renowned Canadian novelists today include Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, Antonine Maillet, and Anne Hébert. Their popularity in Canada and abroad has reflected widespread readerly interest in Canada's cultural, regional, and linguistic heterogeneity. Earlier novelists, such as John Richardson, Philippe Aubert de Gaspé, Susanna Moodie, Hugh MacLennan, and Gabrielle Roy, among others, garnered popular and critical attention for their works which variously negotiate the formative relationship between individuals and societies at key moments in Canada's sociopolitical development.