ABSTRACT
A political colony of Britain and a cultural colony of the United States, Canada generated few literary celebrities before the First World War. Among the bestknown figures are Bliss Carman, the New Brunswick-born poet who achieved international stardom after he moved to New York in 1890 and linked up with the popular “vagabond” poet Richard Hovey, and L. M. Montgomery, who rose to world-wide celebrity when her girls’ novel, Anne of Green Gables (1908), achieved unprecedented success in the larger English-speaking world and in translation, primarily in Northern Europe. For these two writers, fame at home in Canada was secondary to their international renown. For Pauline Johnson, the reverse held true. Due to her racial distinction as part-Mohawk and to her Canadian nationalism, it was primarily in Canada that she achieved celebrity status, whereas in England she was viewed as an exotic curiosity, and in the United States she was simply an anomaly. Johnson was quickly incorporated into the late nineteenth-century quest for a distinctive Canadian literary identity, a movement that avoided the “opposition between high and low” and the “tension between impersonality and personality” that Loren Glass finds characteristic of American literary celebrity during the same era (3, 5).
