Chapter One Regionalism: Concept, History and Critical Directions
Canadian literature, since its birth, has been obsessed with a persistent urge for self-definition and self-assertion, demanding domestic dissemination and external recognition. Not until recent decades did Canadian writers and critics become less harassed by a seemingly omnipresent sense of lack, a lack in a literary tradition and root that they can look back on. Writing in 1965, the world's renowned Canadian critic Northrop Frye conveyed his concern about the status of his nation's literature by making a lucid dichotomy between unity and identity. For Frye, identity involves what is "local and regional, rooted in the imagination and in the works of culture" (Bush Garden ii), whereas unity is "national in reference, international in perspective, and rooted in a political feeling" (Bush Garden ii). Frye saw that Canadian literature was not an autonomous world and that it should be studied as part of the Canadian life. Since the rise of nationalism in the 1960s, the self-constructive process of Canadian literature has never been separable from coherent cultural, political, and economic efforts. Given the subtle status of Canada—at one time the military outpost of the United Kingdom and an up-to-date economic colony of its southern neighbour, its literature has also been suffering from an identity crisis, which implies a so-called regional position in the sense that it is the peripheral, out on the perimeter, looking toward the center for its definition. At the center of the Canadian literary consciousness there lies a perplexity, as shown in the riddle posed by Frye in his Bush Garden: "Where is here?" (220)
A question as such inevitably relates the identity of Canadian literature to an interrogation of the geographic and cultural significance of Canada. As Frye noted, "the cultural counterpart that we call 'Canada' is really a federation not of provinces but of regions and communities" ("From Nationalism" 8). Similarly Robert Wilson writes:
It does seem, at least to many students of Canadian culture and literature, that Canada falls into regions, that Canadians tend to think of themselves in regional terms, that Canadian writers both follow regional obsessions and also think of themselves as, primarily, regional and that Canadianists, those who convert Canadian literature into an organized body of knowledge and teach it in the universities, also think in these terms, taking the regional diversions as convenient methodological and pedagogic tools, categories of analysis and quasi-natural bases for ourselves and for research. (49)
Indeed, regionalism has been a focus not only in the realm of literature, but it has demanded much attention from other fields of research as well, such as sociology, politics, economics, geography, and so on. And regionalism in Canadian literature seems an unavoidable question if conclusions of a certain magnitude are to be reached without the jeopardy of neglecting the geographic, historical and socio-temporal vein in the formation of the Canadian consciousness..
I. Regionalism in Canadian Literary History
Regionalism has been a term prevalent in institutional discourses in Canada and has played a very conspicuous role in Canadian literature. In effect, regionalism has its origin in the early history of Canadian literature. It can be said that in the pre-Confederation era, almost all writings, largely immature and imitative in essence, were regional by nature, ranging from exploration journals to travel literature and to chronicles and documentary records. As Arnason comments, the immigrants and garrison soldiers from the Great Britain "did not regard themselves as Canadians, but as Englishmen living in a new land. [Their] sense of history is the sense of history of the mother country, not of Canada" (54). Therefore, in the early writings in Canadian literature, Canada was invariably regarded as a remote region of the British Empire.
The main feature of literary regionalism during the pre-Confederation era is the settlers' response to the geographic features of the land. As Woodcock remarks, the birth of regionalism coincided with the settlers' encounter with the land of the New World, triggering a strong sense of "regionalism that to this day marks off the areas of Canada by history—the shared memory of experience—and geography" (Meeting 1). The year 1867 serves as an important divide in the political consciousness of Canadians. People's conception of what is Canada today was shaped by the dominant colonial ideology of centre and region. The outposts and colonies were regarded as the remotest regions of the British Empire. The writings from these outposts, reportorial in form, were considered to be sheer regional writings, the majority of which were concerned with the expression of exile. As W. H. New notes, the imitative literature during the pre-Confederation period "reflected what was understood to be […] fashionable elsewhere—in Paris, London, or later Boston and Philadelphia" (25). The writings of this period dealt with strictly local themes such as winter cold, scurvy, pneumonia, and a host of other settlement and exploitation issues. Naturally, confrontation with the Canadian wilderness and survival became the central themes of the writers. In fact, in the nineteenth century, most literary writings were regional in that they necessarily involved an obsessive delineation of the immigrant experience and the landscape. Their depiction of the environment was either so inimical and inclement as to demand a bare survival or so enchanting and untainted as to instill a romanticism in the vein of Canadian literature. Critics like Eli Mandel, Margaret Atwood, Laurie Ricou unanimously agree to the necessity of the depiction of the Canadian landscape at the inceptive stage of its literature. As Staines echoes this imperative drive in the inception of a national literature, "[t]he delineation of the landscape, however, was important since it was the necessary prelude to the development of a distinctive literature. The immensity and power of the unpopulated land remained for so long a dominant theme of Canadian literature; only after a confrontation with the landscape can the artists move to a confrontation with the land's inhabitants" (Crouched 261).
One of the few writers before Confederation who is of note is perhaps Susanna Moodie, who began the tradition of rejection and survival in environmental delineation central to the Canadian imagination. As an immigrant, Moodie was ill-prepared for her encounter with the Canadian wilderness which frustrated her hopes time and again. Her writings were strictly local and autobiographical, describing her experiences in the bush around Peterborough and in the town of Belleville. Her Roughing It in the Bush; or, Forest Life in Canada is a faithful record of her setbacks and hardships in battling against the weary and disheartening Canadian backwoods. And this book became the fountainhead of Margaret Atwood's collection of poems, The Journals of Susanna Moodie (1970), which "in its own way has become as much of a classic as Roughing It" (Bennett and Brown 94). For Moodie, and for most of her contemporaries as well, Canada was a region, a colony, an adopted country which constantly reminded her of Britain, her mother country. In her time, Moodie served as a colonist-tourist-writer who reported back to Europe the struggles and confrontations that she had in the far-away region of Canada. The sense of Canada as a remote region far from the centre of civilization is rife in the novel. Her incompetence in the face of the Canadian wilderness reinforces the mood of geographic isolation and cultural alienation which are perhaps the reason why regional description has ever since been yoked with a negative association. And in her writing, Moodie becomes a pioneer settler trapped in the remote wilderness of Canada. In an almost irksome tone, the writer addresses the land dealers as "speculators in the folly and credulity of your fellow-men":
[They] prominently set forth all the good to be derived from a settlement in the Backwoods of Canada; while they carefully concealed the toil and hardship to be endured in order to secure these advantages. […] They talked of log houses to be raised in a single day, by the generous exertions of friends and neighbours, but they never ventured upon a picture of the disgusting scenes of riot and low debauchery exhibited during the raising, or upon a description of the dwellings when raised—dens of dirt and misery, which would, in many instances, be shamed by an English pig-sty […]. (132)
Contrary to Moodie, Catherine Parr Traill, her older sister of the Strickland family, was exhilarated by her immigrant experience despite the hardships and adversity. Her The Backwoods of Canada, written in the epistolary form, chronicles her pioneer tasks in the Canadian wilderness. In this book, often regarded as her pioneer memoirs, Traill provides a highly realistic representation of the uninhabitable landscape bordering upon personal accounts. Together with Moodie's writing, Traill's settlement narratives preceded the pioneer novel in the 1920s by such prairie authors as Martha Ostenso, F. P. Grove, and Robert Stead. Like her sister, Traill also dwelled on regional details in her writing, such as the botanical descriptions, life in the bush, and so on. Her The Female Emigrant's Guide, and Hints on Canadian Housekeeping even gives most detailed instructions on emigrant life. Traill even weaves local history into her books, giving her writing a remarkably "regional" flavour.
In truth, most writings in the pre-Confederation era were characterized with regional themes and the notion of region was clearly evident in these writings. The names are too numerous to mention. For instance, Thomas Haliburton's series of The Clockmaker appeared as serial publications titled "Recollections of Nova Scotia" in The Novascotian in 1835. The Bluenose dialect permeates the books so that they are dismissed by critics as "provincial, […] rapid, […] and much enlivened with dry humour" (qtd. in New History 63). In The Clockmaker, through the conversation between the Squire and Sam Slick, the Yankee pedlar from Connecticut, the reader senses a strong regional consciousness:
This place is as fertile as Illanoy or Ohio, as healthy as any part of the globe, and right alongside of the salt water; but the folks want three things—Industry, Enterprise, Economy. These Bluenoses don't know how to vally this location; only look at it, and see what a place for bisness it is: the centre of the Province; the natural capital of the Basin of Minas, and part of the Bay of Funday; the great thoroughfare to St. John, Canada, and the United States; the exports of lime, gypsum, freestone, and grindstone; the dykes—but it's no use talkin'; I wish we had it, that's all. (163)
Regional concerns continued with the nationalist pace of Canada. With the establishment of the Dominion of Canada on July 1, 1867, regional conflicts became stronger, despite the fact that a new nation had just emerged from a miscellany of former British colonies. By the British North America Act, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Canada, the latter of which now divided into Ontario and Quebec, were united, and in the course of the next fifty years, new territories were carved out and absorbed in the Dominion: the acquisition of Rupert's Land and the North-West Territories in 1869, followed by the creation of the province of Manitoba in 1870, the admission of British Columbia in 1871, and Prince Edward Island in 1873, and finally the entry of two newly created provinces of Saskatchewan and Alberta in 1905. W. H. New comments on the consequent regional strife in the post-Confederation years:
In practice it not only shaped Canada territorially, it also shaped many of the regional and ethnic tensions which continue to challenge the language and structures of Canadian power. Much of Canadian history at this time is bound up with the events that defined the national from the (centralist) perspective of Ontario and Quebec; coincidentally these same events, in particular railway-building and the Riel Rebellion, invited future challenges to centralist ideas. (A History 79)
The social milieu necessarily influenced the literary vogue, and with the further political polarization between centrality and periphery, writers were involved in their endeavour to shape the regions of their own. Many writers drew on local and historical particulars for literary inspiration. Many historical happenings became literary prototypes. The building of the Canadian Pacific Railway, the frontier theme, the Riel Rebellion, and the Great Depression have found their way into Western Canadian fiction. For instance, many writings were based on the Riel Rebellion, such as J. E. Collins The Story of Louis Riel (1885) and Annette the Métis Spy (1887). The Canadian West and North found their literary spokesmen in Charles Mair, Chalres William Gordon ("Ralph Cornor"), Nellie McClung, Robert Service, whereas Duncan Campbell Scott, in his In the Village of Viger, wrote about French Canada in the form of sketches and stories, to which readers "as late as the 1960s responded conventionally" and dismissed as "local colour" (New A History 124). Stephen Leacock, on the other hand, captured true glimpses of a small town in Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (1912), a series of stories based on his childhood experiences in Orillia, Ontario. And in Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich (1914), he "exposes how urban bourgeois provincialism accepts the form of fads and institutions without even appreciating the substance" (New A History 127). The names relating to literary regionalism are too many to enumerate, but their writings all shared a realistic interest in personal experiences, local details and regional histories.
A prominent author who persistently drew on regional interest was Charles G. D. Roberts. As one of the Confederation poets who inherited the lyrical romantic tradition of their British counterparts, he eulogized in his poetry and short stories the tidal flats and marshes and the fertile farmlands along the Tantramar region in New Brunswick. He afforded the Canadian regionalist tradition a detailed "psychological" presentation of beasts, fish, birds, and insects. In his The Last Barrier and Other Stories, the animals and insects are endowed with human reasoning and feelings, often finding themselves at odds with the menaces of survival from natural forces and enemies. Local settings recur in the stories, such as Nictau Lake, the Little Tobique, Bald Mountain, and Mamozekel. Charles G. D. Roberts is today relegated to oblivion by critics in Canada and he is only remembered as a poet. However, his animal stories register as the most subtle of their kind in not only his regional concern but also in his universal expression of human morality through the animal analogies. It is worthy of note that Roberts' stories, unlike those allegorical stories of Aesop and Anderson, who employ animal figures for didactic and satirical purposes, depict the animals from an animal perspective. Sometimes, the narrator assumes the identity of an eagle or a salmon. As Lucas comments, Roberts "owes little or nothing directly to these authors," because he "describes the adventures of a wild […] beast, and […] describes them from the animal's own point of view" (vi). Furthermore, Roberts sketches his nearest surroundings from his childhood and youth with a strong regional and sentimental nostalgia. The Darwinist depiction of animals in such unique landscape of New Brunswick is not immune from the rigidly realistic influence. What is significant is that Roberts "attempts to write of universal forces, love, innocence, exile, death, and the impact on such human experience of the local, wild, frontier of eastern New Brunswick, […] by creating a fable and then transcends it by symbolically rendering his materials into a genuine Canadian myth" (Gold i). He writes not only from memory but mainly from imagination, an obsession with the Canadian wilderness, albeit his stories are accused of inaccuracy and discrepancy. His animal biographies such as in "The Last Barrier" and "The King of Mamozekel" truly mirror the indigenous life of New Brunswick. Such stories, therefore, should by no means be confined to a naturalist or zoological construction. These biobehavioural sketches, indeed, reveal an utterance of human truth, the way of life of the maritime people against nature, which is a "busy mingling of comedy and tragedy, of mirth and birth and death, which makes the sum of life […] in the pastures" (Roberts, "Little Tyrant" 53).
The period from around Confederation to the 1940s saw the emergence of Canada's own literature, more often than not expressed in a regional concern. However, as David Staines points out, Canadian literature "began in earnest in the twenties of this [20th] century" (Crouched 262). During the intervening years between the two world wars, there arose many classics of regional literature, mainly in the form of realistic farm novels by Prairie writers, such as Ostenso's Wild Geese (1925), Stead's Grain (1926), and Grove's Settlers of the Marsh (1925). Nevertheless, despite what some critics view as the national consciousness of many authors, the first few decades of the post-Confederation period was characterized by a dire deficiency in readership, which inevitably involved a lack of serious criticism. Speaking in 1987, John Metcalf, who crowned himself as the Canadian literary curmudgeon, argued that "it isn't petulance to deplore in a population of 26 million an audience of .00385%" (Freedom 21). Even worse, publication was also difficult within Canada. Many of the authors got their works published south of the border. D. C. Scott's In the Village of Viger came out in 1896 but was not published in Canada until 1945. After a research in the publication of the authors such as D. C. Scott, Francis Sherman, and Archibald Lampman, John Metcalf came to the conclusion that the circulation of these authors' works was rare. For example, he found that Archibald Lampman's Lyrics of Earth had only 500 copies in print in 1895 out of which "36 bound copies and 194 sets of sheets remained unsold in May 1899" (Freedom 72). D. C. Scott's In the Village of Viger got reprinted in Canada between 1945 and 1969, but it "gives us a total sales figure in Canada of 400 copies in seventy-three years" (Freedom 73). The inadequacy of literary readership and publication, and insubstantial criticism that went on for so long, no doubt, accounted in part for the evaluative degradation of Canadian regional literature. It is not surprising that a critic like John Metcalf would totally deny the existence of a Canadian literature in a country where out of its total population of 26 million "one in five Canadians is illiterate" (Freedom 21).
Canadian literary regionalism has prospered since the 1940s, particularly in accompaniment to the rise and culmination of the nationalist movement in literature. The core of these decades' political, economic, and cultural struggles was the proverbial Canadian issue of identity. Incidentally, for a young nation like Canada, the assertion of nationhood is as much a promotion of its regional value as against the British imperialism and the American capitalism. Northrop Frye writes:
Similarly, the question of Canadian identity, so far as it affects the creative imagination, is not a 'Canadian' question at all, but a regional question. An environment turned outward to the sea, like so much of Newfoundland, and one turned towards inland seas, like so much of the Maritimes, are an imaginative contrast: anyone who has been conditioned by one in his earliest years can hardly become conditioned by the other in the same way. Anyone brought up on the urban plain of southern Ontario or the gentle pays farmland along the south shore of the St. Lawrence may become fascinated by the great sprawling wilderness of Northern Ontario or Ungava, may move there and live with its people and become accepted as one of them, but if he paints or writes about it he will paint or write as an imaginative foreigner. (Bush Garden, Preface i, ii)
Due to the discontent of the various regions within Canada in the face of the cultural and economic annexation of the United States, people in the decades following Confederation felt an urgent need to express Canada as a political unity. Therefore, politicians and writers alike made huge efforts to establish a sense of Canadian nationalism by identifying through their writings a clearly common Canadian experience. For example, Hugh MacLennan's Barometer Rising (1941) and George Grant's Lament for a Nation (1965) are generally acknowledged as noble efforts to define what Woodcock terms the sense of "Canadianness" (George 9).
However, even these nationalist writings have to depend on regional particulars to voice the "Canadianness" they are after. Hugh MacLennan's Barometer Rising shows an example of the re-appropriation of regional history. For instance, in his book, he fictionalizes the Halifax explosion in 1917 while offering a regional as well as national understanding of the consequences of the First World War. Time and place are condensed in this epitomization of the Nova Scotian city. As the hero stands on top of a hill and surveys the oval peninsula, he sees the details of Halifax dim in the fading light, such as the Citadel in the centre of the city and the park in the south, the Northwest Arm inlet in the west, the Stream in the east, the Narrows at the northern end of town, and the lake-like Bedford Basin, which "bulges around the back of the town" (4-5). Furthermore, the hero significantly recalls the history of the land, remembering the Great Glacier that "had once packed, scraped, and riven this whole land […] [and] had gouged out the harbour and left as a legacy three drumlins" (4). It is only then that he realizes that he "had forgotten how good they [the sights in view] were" (4).
Not only is the explosion story based on an authentic event, but the characters in the novel and their names are real, too. The story is a retelling of the history of Colonel Geofffrey Wain and his family. As Hugo Mcpherson points out in the Introduction to the novel, the "original Wain, we learn, was a British N. C. O. who came to Halifax with Cornwallis in 1749. In successive generations the Wains became the city's leading family, but they never learned to think of the country as worthy of them" (xi). Despite the true-to-life sketching of Halifax and its history and geography that MacLennan knew so well, the story and characters take on a symbolic import. George Woodcock argues that this is a pioneer historical novel in Canadian literature because "it was the earliest novel to deal in copious and clearly recognizable detail with a specific Canadian city" (Introducing Hugh MacLennan 19). Commenting on the real names adopted in the novel, the author states in the "Foreword":
Nova Scotia family names have, nevertheless, been employed; to avoid them would have been too definite a loss. Since there is no great variety in Scottish given names, the combinations are inevitably repetitious. The characters are, it is hoped, true to their background, and nothing more. (n. pag.)
Apart from that, the author shrewdly arranges the story in countdown form, starting on the Sunday before the event and ending on the following Monday. Each chapter covers a day and the titles of the chapters are the days themselves. Within each chapter, the author again sets up the plot in chronological order, thus tracing the history of Halifax to an accuracy of hours, chronicling the national and regional allegory to the utmost degree of geographic and historical verity. MacLennan's adoption of local details is a perfect illustration of the inseparability of nationalism from regionalism despite the nationalists' overriding concern for a typical expression of "Canadianness" in their literature.
The blooming of regional literature together with nationalism was not a coincidence, as both were the result of political and cultural policies that were sought to erect an identity for Canadian literature, internally and externally. Critics generally stress the external facet of the impact of nationalism while ignoring the fact that internally there was a very meager source of readership. The prosperity of regionalism in Canada was in part a result of the internal popularization of Canadian literature. To a certain extent, Canadian literature in the late fifties was a marginalized and hence regional literature. Margaret Atwood writes about readership in the period:
On the average, there were about five novels by Canadians published in Canada per year, and sales were doing very well if they reached a thousand copies […]. [I]f you published anything of a serious literary nature, anything at all, you would get reviewed somewhere, and you would be read by the hard-core Canadian Literature audience, which had a shirting population of about two hundred ("Northrop Frye" 402)
The Federal government adopted a series of cultural policies to promote the Canadian identity. In 1957, by the Canada Council Act, the Canada Council for Arts was established in order to foster and promote the production and circulation of works in the arts. The Canada Council funded a great number of artists in promotion of Canadian writing and publishing. Canadian literature began to be studied in universities for the first time. In 1954, CBC initiated a literature programme titled "Anthology" and Robert Weaver, critic, editor, and anthologist, acted as the producer. In addition, CBC Radio also organized CBC Wednesday Night and Canada Reads, to which many writers contributed, among whom were Len Peterson, W. O. Mitchell, Lister Sinclair, and so on. Canada Reads also featured novel reading, including the works of Margaret Laurence, Robert Kroetsch, Margaret Atwood, Carol Shields, and very recently, Hubert Aquin, Guy Vanderhaeghe, and Miriam Toews. The publishing industry also thrived under the financial auspices of the federal and provincial governments. Governor General's Awards were set up to encourage writing. What seemed paradoxical in this national development, however, was that although people felt the need to free themselves from colonialism and regionalism, there was a stronger continuation of literature that focused on a regional articulation. In the 1970s, both Northrop Frye and E. K. Brown felt that regionalism was a negative influence on Canadian literature. E. K. Brown, for instance, feared that "[i]n the end … regionalist art will fail because it stresses the superficial and peculiar at the expense, at least, if not to be exclusion, of the fundamental and universal" ("Problem" 21). Despite the widespread anti-regionalist sentiment, there occurred a great diversification and ramification of Canadian literature. A dozen new publishing houses were established with an eye to promoting national and regional literature, ECW, Anansi (1967), Oberon (1967), and Coach House (1965-1975) being some of the most successful ones(1). Innovative and productive regional literary magazines mushroomed, such as tish, talon, Alphabet, Mainline, Quarry Magazine, grOnk, Weed, and the like, and many writers contributed to these magazines. This small press ephemera and the emergence of literary magazines helped Canadian literature thrive in regional units and some of them were exclusively dedicated to the literary activity of small communities and groups. As Bennett and Brown observe, in the twentieth century, when people "become more aware of the difficulties of history, […] region challenges period as a way of understanding the shape of Canadian literature" (3).
Thus, while nationalist enthusiasts were endeavouring to construct a new monolithic Canadian unity in literature, a much stronger regional undercurrent was also rapidly flowing and swelling. As Indian Canadianist M. F. Salat comments, this "regional-national dialectical opposition in regard to the search for identity is the fall out of the vastly varying regional differences in terms of both the geography and the topography of different regions as well as of socio-cultural milieus of the regions" (Canadian Novel 12). E. K. Brown thus lauded the virtues of regionalism:
Regionalist art may be expected to possess certain admirable virtues. One of these is accuracy, not merely accuracy of fact, but accuracy of tone; and throughout our literature there has been a disposition to force the note, to make life appear nobler or gayer or more intense than Canadian life really is in its typical expressions. It would help us towards cultural maturity if we had a set of novels, or sketches, or memoirs that described the life of Canadian towns and cities as it really is, works in which nothing would be presented that the author had not encountered in his own experience. It should also be acknowledged that a warm emotion for one's petit pays can lead to very charming art, as in Stephen Leacock's humorous transposition of an Ontario town in his Sunshine Sketches. ("Problem" 21)
Frye's remarks on regionalism, too, are based on a simplistic construction of Canadian literary history in that he relied on the imaginative powers of literary creation, as he wrote in the "Conclusion" to A Literary History of Canada, "[l]iterature is conscious mythology: as society develops, its mythical stories become structural principles of storytelling, its mythical concepts, sun-gods and the like, become habits of metaphorical thought" (Bush Garden 232). He implied that English Canadian literature was severed from a mythological continuity and had to refer to a Canadian coinage. True as he is in stating that, he has neglected the shaping force of the environmental, social, and cultural elements on Canadian regionalism. Contrary to the play of imagination and mythic creation in literature, reality has performed a very critical role in Canadian regional writing. In some cases, the realistic strain of Canadian regional literature can be so persistent and pervading that the literary works ooze an entire environmental determinism and existentialism, as in Sinclair Ross's As For Me and My House, F P. Grove's Settlers of the Marsh and Over Prairie Trails, so much so that when the latter's In Search of Myself, a novel which highly fictionalized his own self through realist presentation, came out in 1946, it eerily won him the following year the Governor General's Award for non-fiction.
With the culmination of nationalism in 1967, in which year Canada celebrated its centenary, Canadian literary regionalism began to be characterized with a promotion of regionality. This period went hand in hand with the prosperity of postmodernism and other poststructuralist theories in the 1980s that celebrated particularity, individuation, and marginalization. Nationalist overgeneralizations of typical Canadian themes encountered strong critical interrogation, particularly from politicians and writers with an intense interest in cultural diversity and regional disparity. Thus Margaret Atwood's Survival (1972) came under fierce attack for her ambitious attempt to seek a literary unity. In the book, Margaret Atwood writes:
[Canadian literature is] a map, a geography of the mind. Our literature is one such map, if we can learn to read it as our literature, as the product of who and where we have been. We need such a map desperately, we need to know about here, because here is where we live. For the members of a country or a culture, shared knowledge of their place, their here, is not a luxury but a necessity. (18-9)
In reaction to the political celebration of diversity and difference, critics began to appeal for a re-evaluation of regionalism and a re-discovery of the universal aesthetics of regional truths. Thus writers moved away from over-generalizing themes of the common Canadian experience by cultivating a sense of "indigeneity" (Ashcroft et al. 135). With an awareness of the nation as what Margaret Atwood terms the "home ground, foreign territory" (Surfacing 11), writers resorted to the cultural ancestry of their regions, taking a strong interest in the folktales, legends, and history of the aboriginal peoples or Métis in hopes of discovering a deep rootedness in the land. Rudy Wiebe stands as a literary pioneer who shapes his regional identity by exploring the local history of his region. For Wiebe, the abundance of the Canadian past remains unexplored, and the richness of history dwells in the land itself. Born near Fairholme in northern Saskatchewan, the writer was fascinated by the unique landscape and the tales of the buffalo-hunting Plains Cree. As he states in an interview, "it seemed to me that when I looked at the past of where I was at […] there was as much past there as anywhere else in the world" (Melnyk 205). By going into the culture of the First Nations peoples and the Métis, Wiebe constructs a regional epic that often draws upon the oral tradition of the aboriginal culture, providing a unique way of perceiving the region and the nation as well. For Wiebe, indigeneity occupies a central position in serious literature and it is a key element in the promotion of cultural diversity. For example, his The Temptations of Big Bear (1973), which chronicles the disintegration of the Cree nation in the process of Canada's nation building, is a magnificent manifestation of regional culture. Furthermore, his unabated interest in the regional led to another novel, The Scorched-Wood People (1977), in which he took up the famous Louis Riel Métis Uprising of 1885 again, providing a unique delineation of the cultural landscape of western Canada. Wiebe's The Temptations of Big Bear, like MacLennan's Barometer Rising, follows strictly chronological order, depicting in six chapters events from September 13, 1876 to January 17, 1888. Wiebe's writing of these novels is clearly a disruption of the nationalist imperative for a homogeneous Canadian unity. In fact, in the process of writing, the author made investigations into the history of the Indian tribes, historical documents, government archives, personal reminiscences and memoirs, newspapers, and interviews. For Wiebe, official records about Big Bear and Louis Riel are biased and tainted with a stance that mirrors the value system of the institution. In his artistic remolding of historical events, Wiebe resorts to his power of invention. The writer prefaces the novel with a declaration that all the real characters, dates, events are "products of a particular imagination" (n. pag.). Sometimes Wiebe even "has to create appropriate documents. Occasionally, this is rendered unavoidable because of an unfortunate gap in the historical evidence" (Keith, Art 67). In doing so, Wiebe embraces a new post-nationalist cultural identity of Canada through his regional articulation of cultural diversity. As Salat comments, Wiebe's reuse of local history is an act of "acknowledging and accepting the disowned indigenous cultural ancestry" (Rudy Wiebe 98). His defiance of the official records of Big Bear functions not to overthrow the dominant national ideology and provide "an alternative monologic vision" (Toorn 100), but to contribute to the polyglossia of literary discourse through a regional enunciation. By allowing for the play of the othered voice, regionalist literary text about suppressed history elevates the marginalized voices to an empowered station, posing a challenge to the political ethos of the centre, thus enacting a subversion of the notion of literary cosmpolitanism that governs the monologic hierarchy of pro-nationalist Canadian discourse.
The revival of regionalism in the 1980s and 1990s was revolutionary in that it brought about a reversal of literary centrism and ushered in a new age in which writers celebrated regional writing. The socio-political greenhouse that contributed to the rejuvenation of regionalism—indeed, regionalism had never before been enjoying a favourable reputation due to the concepts of parochialism and centrifugalism that were always coupled to it—was Canada's adoption of the multicultural policy in 1971. Furthermore, in 1988, the Parliament passed the Multiculturalism Act of Canada, with a view to promoting the multicultural heritage of Canada. The adoption of multicultural policies was originally aimed at invigorating the plural pulses of Canadian ethnic groups, and its impact was far-reaching and profound. Unlike the "melting-pot" situation of the United States, multiculturalism is a move further towards cultural pluralism that decentralizes the domination of unity, and it is a process of engaging diversity as different yet equal. This framework for the full and equal participation of minority groups and individuals through the removal of discriminatory, institutional, cultural and structural barriers served as a backup for regional polyphony in Canadian literature, at the heart of which, in the spirit of multiculturalism, is the ideology of unity within diversity and a recognition of diversity as the very Canadian identity. This belief in diversity further led to not only an autonomy of regional consciousnesses in literature but also a balkanization of the country into further regions that worked on ethnic division rather than geographic disparity. The multicultural policy brought about a splintering of Canada in sectionalized forms such as geography, race, sex orientation, rural and urban differences, and so on. Political and economic differences came to the fore in the wake of the nationalist frenzy in the 1970s. Such heterogeneous cultural celebrations eventually gave rise to a surge of separatist movements. Western alienation led to the founding of the Western Canada Concept, a separatist group headed by Douglas Christie, who aimed to achieve independence of the four western provinces "in the realization that reform in Canada [was] really impossible." Apart from Parti Quebecois, there emerged other separatist groups(2). In the literary scene, writers became more and more devoted to regional themes. Rudy Wiebe retained a continued interest in the local history of the Native peoples of the North. His The Mad Trapper (1980) chronicles the mystery of the sharpshooter Albert Johnson on Rat River. In this story, Albert Johnson becomes isolated from society and turns to violence and is in turn hunted by the Northern people. Wiebe's interest in the Franklin expedition is also seen in A Discovery of Strangers (1994), and Playing Dead: a Contemplation Concerning the Arctic (1989). Likewise, Jack Hodgins, born in 1938 in a small farming and logging town called Melville, on Vancouver Island, is dedicated to his birthplace. In his The Invention of the World (1977) and The Resurrection of Joseph Bourne (1979), Hodgins not only adumbrates the landscape of the beautiful Vancouver Island and the Comox Valley but also weaves history, tales and legends of the island into his literary fabrics so much so that Hodgins's novels are encircled in a strong halo of magic realism. His later novels, such as Innocent Cities (1990) and The Macken Charm (1995) continue to explore the local mystery of isolation and communication, thus linking local settings with cosmopolitan and universal scenes of humanity.
A recent novel of prominence which draws on regional themes is Miriam Toews' award-winning A Complicated Kindness (2004), set in East Village, a Mennonite community near Winnipeg. Written in first-person narrative, the novel is an autobiographical account of the author's own region. In the novel, Nomi Nickel, the adolescent protagonist, unfolds to the reader the falling apart of her family under the reign of religious fundamentalism and her own emotional crises due to the departure of her mother Trudie Nickel and her sister Tash. Under the oppressive rules of fundamentalism, Nomi's family are all excommunicated from the suffocating Mennonite community which Nomi describes as "the most embarrassing sub-sect of people to belong to if you're a teenager" (5). In spite of all this, Nomi is unable to flee the bleak town of East Village, which "is the name of the area in New York city that I would most love to inhabit" (5). The story presents a stifling atmosphere of geographic and spiritual isolation in East Village:
This town is so severe. And silent. It makes me crazy, the silence. I wonder if a person can die from it. The town office building has a giant filing cabinet full of death certificates that say choked to death on his own anger or suffocated from unexpressed feelings of unhappiness. Silentium. People here just can't wait to die, it seems. It's the main event. The only reason we're not all snuffed at birth is because that would reduce our suffering by a lifetime. (4-5)
The narrator tells us that she "would love to read the diary of a girl my age—a girl from the city. Or a textbook on urban planning. Or a New York City phone book." (6). The writer deliberately draws on her own biographical details to construct this fictional world in her story so that truth and fiction are perfectly wedded to resist a clear definition of the genre of the writing. Real place names occur in the novel, such as the Mennonite heritage village, a major tourist attraction in Canada. Indeed, Toews herself objects to the book being classified as a novel. Rather, she has "described it as a series of linked vignettes" ("Teacher's Guide"). Such a thorough adherence to regional particulars not only overthrows the boundary between fact and fiction but also defies traditional prejudice against region, enthroning it as the centre of literary artifice.
Indeed, the regionalist force seems to have been ever strengthening amidst the concomitant accusation of its limitedness in scope and lack of universal interest or significance. And contemporary writers who delight in rural settings and narration of the seemingly local events abound, such as David Adams Richards, Alistair MacLeod, Joan Clark, Gabrielle Roy, Guy Vanderhaeghe, Robert Kroetsch, Jane Urquhart, Sharon Butala, Robert Currie, Ken Mitchell, and so on. However, as Canadian literature moves on in the larger context of multiculturalism which celebrates diversity and difference rather than homogeneity and sameness, regionalism in literature will continue to blossom with the writers' concern for the universal themes of humanity through the microcosmic lens of region and community.
II. The Problems with Regionalism: Politics and Canonicity
Although general critical opinions towards regionalism have always been predominantly inclined towards an effacement of its local trivialities, the seemingly local, parochial, and provincial preference has been tenacious on the part of the writers. Such a divided stance concerning regionalism results, to some extent, from a difference in attitude towards the needs and objectives of Canadian literature itself, a not-so-rare phenomenon consequent upon the literary nascence and growth of a country like Canada that is finding itself wrestling with issues of (post-)colonialism, (post-)Confederalism, (post-)modernism, and the like. The politicization of literature inevitably subjected Canadian literature to self-definitive ambitions and aspirations. Critical assessment of Canadian literature and regional writing has always been conducted under a burden of political self-expressiveness and under the pretence of anti-imperialism and post-colonialism. A scan of the political scene that has been carrying on in Canada since the 1960s will reveal the weight of politicization of literary production in molding a nation's literature known as Canadian. The politicization of literary production not only found way into the institution of critical criteria but also into issues of canonicity. These necessitate the value judgment of regionalism against universalism, nationalism against internationalism, and further involves organized governmental and institutional efforts in literary and cultural mass production such as the small press phenomenon in the 1970s and mass media collaborations.
Canonicity works on the premises of artistic and literary maturity, which is in itself the source of much controversy in Canada. For David Staines, Canadian literature came of age in the 1920s, whereas John Metcalf, a somewhat cynic and poignant critic as well as poet and novelist, holds "most Canadian writing up until 1950" as "rubbish" (What 9), and furthermore, as he comments rather belligerently, the primary concern for the critics has been "'Canadian-ness' rather than quality" (What 9), and "[n]ot much has changed in the last forty years; one still hears in 1987 the same dreary tunes one hears in 1947" (What 10). To what extent does the validity of these remarks hold is another bone of contention; however, Metcalf is uttering a grain of truth about the politics of the literary text. Neither (inter-)nationalism nor regionalism was acquitted of the process of politicization. In effect, nationalism itself is a nation-wide regionalism as it strives to attain cosmopolitanism as embodied by great "central" literatures from New York, London and Paris. The basic innuendo of literary nationalism is that Canada is the margin, the periphery, the outskirts of culture and it must rid itself of its colonial status, a regional significance secondary to the centers of U.S. and Britain. Metcalf writes on the de-marginalization of Canada's regional/national literature:
The pros and cons of a Canadian literature have been dancing the same ritual dance for close to a hundred years: parochial against universal, nationalist against internationalist, sturdy modest Canadian against smarmy cosmopolitan with brilliantined hair. It is all rather tedious. And none of it, of course, has much to do with literature. In all these debates, the real subject is the politics of Canadian sovereignty. (What 9)
Frank Davey also argues that regionalism is not only an ideological form of response to the nation-state, but also should be "perceived as a production of the nation-state and as partly serving the nation-state's interests" ("Toward" 5).
Regionalism in Canada has been regarded as an impediment that fetters the development of national literature, and it is associated quite unfavourably with parochialism or provincialism, tinted with a rural, peripheral color, lacking in "cosmopolitan breadth" (MacMechan 237), and in "the outstanding achievements of human thought and genius" (Stevenson 4). As Pryse argues, "the cultural processes of canon and nation formation have combined to marginalize or suppress regionalist writing" (19). Hugh MacLennan, a literary pioneer of nationalist themes, lamented the hindrance of regionalism to Canadian literature: "[I]s Canadian society so undeveloped, so close to pioneer origin, so innocent that its problems and spiritual crises can have little significance for the rest of humanity? In brief, is Canadian literature doomed to lie half stagnant in the backwaters of regionalism?" ("Canada" 362) For MacLennan, the "obvious, and only, answer to this problem is for Canadian writers to stop writing regional novels, […] and permit themselves only universal themes, if they hope to reach a world audience and take their place in the branch cycle of American literature" ("Canada" 367). Obviously, MacLennan was far more concerned about the peripheral status of Canadian literature as a whole than about the regional variety within. Canadian writers, in the view of MacLennan, should refrain from local themes but adhere to themes of universal significance, the latter suggesting themes that no longer bear traces of the Canadian consciousness. MacLennan defined literary regionalism as "a theme which is derived solely from the locale of the story, in which costumes, dialect, characters, beliefs, prejudices, and folkways form the core of the whole book" ("Canada" 365). Nevertheless, in MacLennan's criteria, there are serious regional novels and those that are not. Basically, any novel that is derived from a locale is regional, but what distinguishes a serious novel from others is, according to MacLennan, "a source of conflict produced by a condition largely of local origin" ("Canada" 366). For MacLennan, this sort of regional novel is inevitable as a result of its "scientific approach to life, the approach which breaks down the whole into its component parts and studies them at leisure" ("Canada" 366). At the core of this type of regionalism is the novelist as sociologist who captures scenes of everyday life with his candid camera and unfolds before his viewer an unadulterated graphic representation of reality.
E. K. Brown, the first influential Canadian literary critic, also remarked in 1944 that regionalism was a force "which tells against the immediate growth of a national literature" ("On Canadian Poetry" 332), thus reducing regionalism to something that militated against a national uniformity in literature. He warned the public of "the dangers of regionalism," saying that "our literature may be expected to become emphatically regionalist" ("Problem" 16). E. K. Brown feared that political allegiance to Britain and economic penetration of the U. S. might render Canada vulnerable to the cultural annexation of both, particularly the latter. In social life, the study of literature and the assertion of Canada's literary selfhood were closely intertwined with efforts in other fields. Political campaigns were launched and cultural endeavours were made in order for Canada to emerge as a new nation. The affiliation of Newfoundland to Confederation in 1949 and the adoption of the Maple Leaf Flag in 1964 precipitated a nation-wide urge for Canada's identity. The pre-nationalist era of Canadian literature already saw the need to rid itself of what Northrop Frye termed the "garrison mentality" (Bush Garden 225). On the contrary, A. J. M. Smith, in examining the merits of Canadian books on poetry in the 1940s, scrutinized the quality of publication while challenging the pretension of a unifying Canadian voice in literature. Furthermore, Smith questioned the legitimacy of a preference for regional manifestations of a national literary diversity. He obliterated the boundaries between a national and a regional literature, and instead drew attention to the artistic values of literature, a set of standards that were believed to be capable of gauging the sympathetic and intelligent accomplishments of Canadian poets and story-tellers. According to Sutherland, these standards "must be rigorously enforced; all work printed will be examined to the best of our ability not in the light of a dubious nationalism or regionalism, not in obeisance to 'big Canadian names' or so-called national traditions, but in respect to that general cosmopolitan culture to which we all adhere" (353).
Controversies over the limitations of regionalism have plagued literary historians and have given rise to debates about the canonicity of regional writing. Regionalism is conventionally deemed to be virtually tantamount to literary transience, superficiality and triviality. However, with respect to the spatial continuum of regionalism, one has to ask the question whether local settings have legitimacy in literary creation. Does literature have to be set in a somehow important city such as Paris, London, or in a place with mass popularity and familiarity, or if neither, in a place with a bit of history, certainly not a new immigrant town rising out of the wilderness? Evidently, all literatures arise from a certain locality and the setting of a literary work does not in the least determine the value of the work. Geographic remoteness, for example, does not stand in the way of a literary work to becoming an artistic piece of universal significance. All literature is ontologically regional and no literature can transcend the place out of which it rises. James Joyce's Dubliners depicts the characters and events of a regional place as much as Willa Cather's O, Pioneers! does her own region. So do Jack Hodgins' The Invention of the World and Robert Currie's Night Games. In terms of spatiality, regionalism is endowed with a political and ideological ostentation that positions certain literary works on the circumference of that which is deemed central. The distinction of hinterland and heartland literatures only locates the writing itself within a framework of political power relationships. Furthermore, regionalism seems to be widening its sphere of action in recent time. Anthologies appear based on provincial boundaries rather than geographic distinctions. The substitution of political, economic, and ideological differentiation of regionalism further complicates the regionalism that traditionally worked on territorialization. Anthologization begins to assume a social, political, and historical pregnancy. The understanding of "Maritime" and "Prairie" literatures has shifted in abeyance from geographic sectionalism to political and provincial divisionism whose core question is identity, and anthologies of this kind are too numerous to mention(3).
The fear of the trivial and superficial nature of regional topics also pulls the subject into a quagmire of political ideology. William Faulkner was dedicated to his own region, the deep South, particularly in the imaginary county of Yoknapatawpha, just as was Stephen Leacock to his Mariposa, and Margaret Laurence to her Manawaka, etc. Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha is a microcosmic South, distressed with moral decay and anguish, abuse and violence, tragedy and squalor, thus rendering the entire novel a humanist concern for universal welfare and compassion. And so are the settings of Leacock, Laurence, and other writers. Stephen Leacock, for example, in his satirical Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town and Arcadian Adventures sketches an antithesis of a small Ontario town and a mechanized American city. The two regional places are contrasted in such a way that we perceive them not only as two places, but as two prototypes that present the Canadian and the American lives. Leacock ridicules the leisurely pace and indolence of the lack-lustre Mariposa people in contrast to the hustle and bustle of Plutoria. The caustic treatment of the human folly at Mariposa and Plutoria falls nothing short of a universal significance. The dramatic, pastoral, and idyllic jauntiness of Mariposa as against the materialistic ambition of Plutoria qualifies the work itself as a literary masterpiece. Stephen Leacock comes in the same literary strain with his Nova Scotian predecessors Thomas McCulloch and Thomas Haliburton, the latter of whom also satirizes the lack of energy and enterprise of the Bluenoses of Nova Scotia. However, it is remarkable that the writers themselves are self-consciously sarcastic. In other words, what lends their works a regional semblance is their parochial and provincial tone of voice or vision in narration rather than the temporal or geographic significance. As David Stouck argues, "Haliburton had a simple propagandistic motive for publishing The Clockmaker sketches: he wanted to arouse his countrymen to the need for agricultural and commercial reforms" (5). Leacock had about the same regional vision when he wrote Sunshine Sketches:
The rest of the world can erect its great monumental literary images all it wants, Leacock suggests, but look for a moment at what happens when we try to cast ourselves in such Great Moments. We end up looking foolish. And we know how foolish we look. Furthermore, we like ourselves for it all the same! (Hodgins 188)
Clearly, the problem with regionalism is not a question of literature itself, nor of literariness. Regionalism has been guised with a political coating that embodies systems of value in terms of colonial binary oppositions such as cosmopolitan and regional, profound and superficial, central and rural, pastoral and commercial, universal and provincial, nostalgic and prospective. Hence Northrop Frye is right in saying that regionalism stems from a "garrison mentality," if we employ the term in that derogatory sense. In more accurate terms, regionalism is a concept steeped in the muddy water of politics, ideology, history, and economy. Meanwhile, one should also bear in mind that regionalism, devoid of its political guise and emotional coloring, is exactly what some contemporary critics and writers are after. Therefore, all charges against regionalism heedless of its colonial mentality, political pregnancy, national or regional consciousness, would be extraneous and irrelevant. Geographic, historical, and social parameters and elements in Canadian literature should by no means be listed as the true hindrance to nationalism. And it is due to this that we see the validity of putting the problematic political, rather than geographic regionalism, into a larger context of colonialism and post-colonialism.
Furthermore, the concept of literary regionalism is constantly on the move, ramifying into a variety of side issues. The pre-Confederation and nationalist regionalisms are impregnated with colonial concerns, whereas the post-nationalist regionalism stresses difference, whether historical, social, political, or, in a single word: cultural. The significant yet insidious shift from unity to difference marks a new form of literary regionalism in Canadian literature. This change also entails a shift in focus from external regionalism to internal regionalism. The term external regionalism, or nationalistic regionalism, is used to mean the regionalism that attempts to enunciate Canada's post-colonial stance, and internal regionalism is used to suggest an introverted writing of the region, a transfer from reference to introspection and even to narcissism. Similarly, Frank Davey makes a distinction between visible and invisible regionalisms in his political study of literary regionalism. He argues that visible regionalisms are "those most frequently constructed in anthologies and criticism, and most successfully publicized and commodified as regionalism both outside and within the geographic areas they claim to regionalize" ("Toward" 5). For instance, Southern Ontario regionalism functions as a successful yet invisible regionalism, virtually passing itself as the "Canadian nationalism […], or as an internationalism" ("Toward" 6). Meanwhile, as Davey goes on to argue, "[r]egionalisms can also be internally successful without meeting similar external success. This usually occurs when the regionalism is more a self-production than a production of the nation state" ("Toward" 6). West Coast and Prairie regionalisms have been internally successful in constructing a distinctive regional literary edifice, but they have not had a considerable contribution to the building of an (inter-)national literary landmark. Davey gives some more examples of unsuccessful visible regional writers from British Columbia, such as Howard White, Gerry Gilbert, Peter Trower, Barry McKinnon, the reason for whose inability to achieve extra-regional fame is that they are "most self-consciously regional" ("Toward" 6).
With regard to the canonization of Canadian literature, critics convened several times with a view to solving the national/regional conflict, such as the conferences in Vancouver in 1956, in Fredericton in 1970, in Calgary in 1973, in Banff in 1978, and in Regina in 1979. Most notably, in 1978, the Calgary Conference on the Canadian Novel was held to appraise the literary performance of Canada's national literature. The participants of the conference were asked to choose "the most 'important' one hundred works of fiction," "the most important ten novels," and "the most important ten works of various genres" (Steele 150). Such an explicit canonization incurred the complaint of many critics. As Ronald Sutherland argues, such politicized manipulation "was an unfortunate and misguided gimmick and that the decision of ECW PRESS to publicize it further is a disservice to Canadian writing" (qtd. in Steele, 150-1). Nevertheless, there were two noticeable things on the ballot list, namely, most of the novels listed would be called regional according to our standard and the topic of regionalism was reconsidered by critics and writers from a perspective different from that of E. K. Brown and Northrop Frye. Eli Mandel proposed the question of "rethinking the values of regional writing in the light […] of contemporary achievement" ("Regional Novel" 105). Robert Kroetcsh came up with a list of the novels "I/We shouldn't/can't avoid" ("Contemporary" 16). Among them were "[t]he region as novelist[,] Sinclair Ross, Buckler, Grove: in the sense that they are written by place, by weather" ("Contemporary" 17). Although the Calgary Conference reeked of a banausic infamy of literary pragmatism and utilitarianism, critics, though only a few in number, started to give credit to a regionalism that had long been committed to negligence and dismissed as a malignant presence in the face of national literature.
If the voice for regionalism was only faint and inaudible in the 1970s and 1980s, by the mid-1990s there had already emerged a regional sonority that resounded with the particularity and difference of the regional as opposed to the orchestral symphony of miscellany. In spite of the further charges from critics like W. J. Keith of regionalism being too astray from mainstream Canadian literature, Canadian literature began to move on "from identity to hybridity" (Godard 209). As Herb Wyile writes in his 1996 article, "with the concept of the monolithic nation-state on the wane, and with artists and academics becoming increasingly anti-centric and sensitive to the importance of difference and particularity, the way is being paved for a revival of sorts for regionalism" ("Writing" 10). As a result, works celebrating regional literatures began to emerge as of the late 1980s. And critics start to focus on the writing of their own regions and find the aesthetic and literary values(4) previously suppressed by the nationalist discourse. The celebration of regional literary tradition and continuity has brought about numerous critical books on regional literature, as are exemplified in Janice Kulyk Keefer's Under Eastern Eyes: A Critical Reading of Maritime Fiction (1987), George Mylnk's The Literary History of Alberta (1998), and Robert Wardhaugh's Toward Defining the Prairies: Region, Culture and History (2001). Literary journals also play a more active role in promoting regionalism. Canadian Literature, a quarterly journal initiated by George Woodcock, himself a staunch regionalist, has devoted a series of issues to the subject of regionalism since the 1990s, covering Newfoundland literature, Northern literature, Maritime literature, and others. No wonder Eli Mandel announces that "the traditional framework of regions is no longer adequate as a basis for discussion of Canadian society for a simple reason. It no longer exists" ("Regional Novel" 120).
III. Regionalism and Critical Interrogation
One of the issues that engage critical attention is the persistence of realism in regional literature. In a regionalist text, geographic depictions are usually provided in great detail and historical events find their way into the text with a tremendous faithfulness and even the characters sometimes bear a strict semblance to reality. The persistence of realism in Canadian regional writing has evoked vehement critical interrogation as well as laudatory remarks. Many critics have mixed feelings about the prevalence of realism in Canadian literature. While bemoaning its stark faithfulness to reality and its artistic inadequacy in "documenting Canadian customs" (Henighan, "Writing" 33), most critics paradoxically acknowledge its inevitability considering the political, social, cultural, and regional circumstances of reality. Such a mood has had so profound an impact on the Canadian consciousness that it has given birth to a multitude of realisms based on different regions, such as urban realism, prairie realism, etc. The regionalist adherence to realism has been so strong that there also exists a naturalist and environmentalist touch in many regional novels such as those of Robert Stead, Sinclair Ross, Henry Kreisel, and Frederick Philip Grove. Writing in 1975, George Bowering blamed the dominant presence of realism on the "good old puritanism" (525) that arose from man's confrontation with the bitter environment and from his survival instinct in the face of the Canadian cold and wild. While accusing Canadian writers of their preference for the realistic mode of story-telling, Bowering admitted that realism was useful because it could reflect the "values and culture of the Canadian people" (526). He wrote:
So in frozen Prince Albert and Toronto Dominion the reviewers pick up a language-centred novel, sniff it, and say, this must have been fun to write, but it is frivolous. Or the university critics open a story about joining the seal herd, and set about fitting it into the theme of survival, or was that Canada as a northern people, or could this one be the garrison mentality? That is, if you can convince yourself that literature is really sociology, you can anabolize your Canadian citizenship. (526)
Eli Mandel also identifies two most distinguishing features of a regional writing, namely, accuracy in description, and the poetic power of the author in evoking the environmental forces in his work. Therefore, he feels the need to preserve realism and insists on "the presence of a limited and peculiar environment accurately described" ("Images" 47).
