ABSTRACT
Canadian writing has always pervaded by wilderness awareness, those vast areas of dark forests, endless prairies or trackless wastes of snow which are geographical facts and written into the history of Canada's exploration and settlement. Throughout the Canadian literary tradition wilderness has been and continues the dominant cultural myth, encoding Canadian's imaginative responses to landscape and history as an image of national distinctiveness. If people looking for distinctive signs of Canadianness in women's fiction of the 1970s and 1980s, author suggest that the most important of these found in the wilderness which provides conditions of possibility for emergence of Canadian women writers. An important aspect of this study is the relationship of these contemporary women to their literary and cultural inheritance, where the historical resonance of wilderness cannot be neglected. The wilderness as the pathless image beyond the enclosure of civilized life appropriated by women as the symbol of unmapped territory transformed through writing into female imaginative space.
