ABSTRACT
What were some of the longstanding cultural, political, and rhetorical problems which nation-builders encountered in their attempts to forge a “national idea” of Canada? A colonial possession, fi rst of France (1604-1763), then of Britain (1763-1867) and, from Confederation to the patriation of the Constitution (1867-1982), a Dominion of the British Empire and British Commonwealth, Canada occupied an anomalous, unstable position in the British, Anglo-colonial, and French-Canadian imaginations that shaped its early literature. Although Canada developed culturally and politically in reaction to times of testing endured with the War of 1812, the Rebellions of 1837, and the Act of Union (1841; the precursor to Confederation), Canadian literature arguably developed primarily in response to the Fall of New
France (1759-1760) which became a dominant theme of English-and French-Canadian fi ction and poetry published in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as one cultural group struggled to justify its conquest of a European colony and another to come to terms with its own defeat and near demise. As literature published from the mid-eighteenth century to the end of the nineteenth suggests, little consensus existed among the English and the French-Canadians about how they should understand themselves in relation to one another, and in relation to the fraught history of settlement, colonization, and conquest that formed the complicated basis of their shared nationality as “Canadians.”
