The Progressive Tradition in Canadian Literature

THE CONVENTIONAL WISDOM in Canadian literary history tells us that the tradition is dominated by themes of exile and ambivalence. In Northrop Frye' s famous meta phor, Canadian culture is seen as a garrison of civilization, gradually extending its influence over a resistant landscape. * A few years later even a relatively critical na tionalist such as Margaret Atwood failed to find much evidence of a literature of so cial protest arising from the Canadian experience.2 In this context, James Doyle has produced a very useful survey that demonstrates the existence of a substantial tradi tion of literary radicalism in Canada. For some years now, Doyle's informative studies of individual writers associ ated with the 20th-century Canadian left have been appearing in the pages of jour nals such as Canadian Literature, Canadian Poetry, and left history. Now we have a full-length book that introduces many more names, and places the writers in the context of a larger tradition that reaches back into the 19th century and that has had a large influence in the 20th century. The scope is not as inclusive as the subtitle

Political science · Sociology · Canadian Identity and History · History · Short Stories in Global Literature