Grooving the Nation: 1965–1980 as a Literary Era in Canada

Abstract

Literary critics have long been the business of defining literary eras. Often the task is to organize national literatures into manageable segments, providing readers with landmarks for what might otherwise seem like sea of narrative. This categorization usually involves making the understandable according to larger national stories. British for example, evolved into categories the Renaissance, the Romantic Period, the Victorian Period, the Modern Period, to name few--defined by time periods that are now widely accepted, although the exact dates may still vary from critic to critic (Abrams 1988, 134 135). American is organized around wars relevant to the definition of the country (the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, World War I, World War II). American literary critic Meyer Abrams suggests that what does not fit into the larger national story is often downloaded into subcategories, [of which] name time span or form of political organization, others prominent intellectual or imaginative mode, and others still predominant form of literature (1988, 130). Canadian has not yet been the subject of intensive debate about categorization, part because it has only recently, by comparison, been packaged as national at all. To complicate matters, English, American, and Canadian national stories share overarching political events such as World War I and World War II, as well as overlapping critical concepts and generic histories associated with the development of the English language. Nevertheless, one would expect Canada's literary categories to differ according to the country's unique and important national moments, just as other national literatures differ according to theirs. I suggest that one of these moments is captured the time span of 1965-1980. This era is uniquely important to Canadian because widespread changes political understandings of national and female identities contextualized the appreciation of published during this time. As will be detailed, identity politics this era was made up of two dominant social movements--Canadian nationalism and second-wave feminism--that prompted Canadians and women to think of themselves differently. For example, wider range of Canadians committed to their national cultural autonomy found economic issues important. Historian Sylvia Bashevkin reports that Gallup surveys show that approximately 7 1 per cent of Canadians 1975 believed that the country had enough US investment, compared with level of 52 per cent 1961 (1991, 24). Similarly, the second-wave feminist movement, typically described as a highly visible proliferation of women's organizations that mobilized an unprecedented range and number of women, politicized issues arising from the idea that women were being denied autonomy sexist society (Prentice el. al. 1996, 414). That these two movements came together at the same place among the same people contributes vitally to the ways Canadian and female fictional characters were understood at this time. Any attempt at literary periodization invites the question of why we need category at all. Certainly an arbitrary span of years should be seen according to some special coherence only if it can pay its own freight the currency of adding something important to understanding that literature. After all, people living at particular time do not necessarily know that they are living defining era, much less when that period might begin or end. There is no suggestion here that this claim of coherence the years 1965-1980 is either encompassingly descriptive or prescriptive of the that should be studied. Instead, it is conclusion drawn from what was important to majority of people national context at certain time, and is meant to generate rather than conclude debate and discussion. My argument suggests that the most salient aspect of the 1965-1980 era was located the political and social Zeitgeist regarding identity, and not the itself Cultural theorist Imre Szeman observes that in Canada the concept of the nation is articulated differently within literary criticism than within literature, and that in Canada (the nation] can be seen as emerging pre-eminently as strategy of reading (2003, 164). …