Wasted Heritage and Waste Heritage: The Critical Disregard of an Important Canadian Novel

Abstract

This paper deals with the critical response to Waste Heritage, Irene Baird’s 1939 novel about social unrest in western Canada. The paper argues that Waste Heritage is an example of a category of fiction which can loosely be called "the novel of engagement," a category which is a dominant form of twentieth-century fiction, but which is also part of the mainstream of the western literary tradition. The paper goes on to argue that Waste Heritage has been ignored because of a "category mistake" in Canadian criticism which labelled such novels ’’social propaganda’’ and refused to consider them on their literary merits. The paper concludes with an analysis of those merits in Waste Heritage.