ABSTRACT
In the late 1950s, the first anthologies of Canadian literature emerged in a hurry to satisfy the teaching demands of academics, from D.G. Godard to D.E. Henderson. This is the first time the anthology of Québec literature has emerged in Canada as a national polysystem, a turning point in Anglophone Canada’s institutional recognition of the country’s bicultural nature, one which needed to be coped with in order to shape its official narrative. This chapter aims to provide a brief review of the literature of Canada in the late 50s, as well as the early 2000s as an attempt to explore the emergence of a postcolonial mentality, in the context of an emerging international context, where second-wave feminism was key, made of Margaret Atwood and Munro, the latter perhaps less nation combative, the face of Canada. It is perhaps this understanding of Canadian literature as necessarily bilingual and bicultural, which demanded of her an intense, geographically complex periplum through the Anglophone and Francophone regions of literary academia, what makes Barbara Godard a very singular, perhaps unique member of her generation.
