ABSTRACT
Such an idea seems obvious, indeed natural to us; of course each and every country has its own great books that we read to understand something about that country and of course each country’s books are diff erent from the books of other countries. When we think more carefully about the whole idea of how distinct national literatures arise, however, we encounter a number of questions. First and foremost, of course, we have the problem of where-and how-nations themselves originate. Many nation-states emerge slowly and with diff erent borders at diff erent times. Canada and the US both undergo a lengthy period of westward expansion that fundamentally changes the geographical form of the nation during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, making even the underlying specifi cation of the nation problematic. e idea of the “nation” never quite matches the complicated histories and geographies of actual nations.
