ABSTRACT
Literature is a solid edifice, a club with fixed and selective membership; traditionally, literary criticism is hagiography, the passing of a hallowed tradition, a clean, well-lighted place. Certainly if Canadian Literature in the 1970s is any indication, that predilection among critics and novelists for writing about a Canadian identity works deleteriously on Canadian literature. The Canadian critics' fixation on nationalism is understandable given the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council guidelines. Understand able, too, is the Canadian fiction writers' preoccupation with the theme, although the reasons for this preoccupation are more paradoxical. The germ for Read Canadian, Robert Fulford explains, was just such a situation as the in which a lack of knowledge of Canadian texts by Canadians is displayed. Margaret Atwood asserts forcefully that survival is the dominant Canadian motif just as the dominant American motif is the frontier and the dominant British motif the island mentality.
