Greening the Maple

Front matter

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Greening © the Maple ©”

CANADIAN ECOCRITICISM IN CONTEXT edited by gt.

CHAPTER 24 The Dwelling Perspective in English-Canadian Drama 511 Nelson Gray Afterword: Ecocritical Futures 527 Ella Soper and Nicholas Bradley

Appendix:

Taking Flight: From Little Grey Birds to The Goose 531 Lisa Szabo-Jones

Notes on the Contributors 547 Index 551 viii GREENING THE MAPLE

Acknowledgments

The editors wish to thank the contributors to this volume for their enthusiasm for the project and their patience during the lengthy and complicated preparation of the book. ‘The editors are also grateful to the staff of the University of Calgary Press for invaluable support and practical assistance. Pamela Banting and Catriona Sandilands (especially in her capacity as Canada Research Chair in York University’s Faculty of Environmental Studies) provided essential guidance. The index was prepared by Christina Francisco. At the University of Victoria, Jenny Jessa, Melanie Hibi, and Katharine Waring provided administrative assistance. The editors also thank the following for permission to republish material: Canadian Literature, Canadian Poetry: Studies, Documents, Reviews, Dalhousie Review, ECW Press, House of Anansi Press (where Matt Williams has been most helpful), Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, NeWest Press, Rodopi, Studies in Canadian Literature, and the University of Tennessee Press.

PUBLICATION INFORMATION FOR REPUBLISHED ESSAYS

Atwood, Margaret. Selections from Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature. Toronto: Anansi, 1972.

Bentley, D.M.R. “Along the Line of Smoky Hills’: Further Steps towards an Ecological Poetics.” Canadian Poetry: Studies, Documents, Reviews 26 (spring—summer 1990): v—xix.

Dawson, Carrie. “The T in Beaver: Sympathetic Identification and Self-Representation in Grey Owl’s Pilgrims of the Wild.” In Five Emus to the King of Siam: Environment and Empire, edited by Helen Tiffin, 113-29. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007.

Dean, Misao. “Political Science: Realism in Roberts’s Animal Stories.” Studies in Canadian Literature 21, no. 1 (1996): 1-16.

Dickinson, Adam. “Pataphysics and Biosemiotics in Lisa Robertson’s Office for Soft Architecture.” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 18, no. 3 (summer 2011): 615-36.

Frye, Northrop. Selections from The Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination. 1971. Concord, ON: Anansi, 1995.

Grace, Sherrill E. “Quest for the Peaceable Kingdom: Urban/Rural Codes in Roy, Laurence, and Atwood.” In Women Writers and the City: Essays in Feminist Literary Criticism, edited by Susan Merrill Squier, 193-209. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1984.

Helms, Gabriele. “Contemporary Canadian Poetry from the Edge: An Exploration of Literary Eco-criticism.” Canadian Poetry: Studies, Documents, Reviews 36 (spring—summer 1995): 44—61.

Hutcheon, Linda. “Eruptions of Postmodernity: The Postcolonial and the Ecological.” Essays on Canadian Writing 51-52 (winter 1993- spring 1994): 146-63.

Lousley, Cheryl. “Knowledge, Power, and Place: Environmental Politics in the Fiction of Matt Cohen and David Adams Richards.” Canadian Literature 195 (winter 2007): 11-30.

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Morra, Linda. “Canadian Art according to Emily Carr: The Search for Indigenous Expression.” Canadian Literature 185 (summer 2005):

43-57.

Mortimer-Sandilands, Catriona. “Calypso Trails: Botanizing on the Bruce Peninsula.” The Dalhousie Review 90, no. 1 (Special Issue: “Groundtruthing: Canada and the Environment”) (spring 2010): 5-22,

Murray, Heather. “Women in the Wilderness.” In 4 Mazing Space: Writing Canadian Women Writing, edited by Shirley Neuman and Smaro Kamboureli, 74-83. Edmonton: Longspoon/NeWest, 1986.

O’Brien, Susie. “Nature’s Nation, National Natures? Reading Ecocriticism in a Canadian Context.” Canadian Poetry: Studies, Documents, Reviews 42 (spring—summer 1998): 17—41.

Ricou, Laurie. “So Big about Green.” Canadian Literature 130 (autumn 1991): 3-6.

Ricou, Laurie. “So Unwise about Green.” Canadian Literature 150 (autumn 1996): 4-6.

Sullivan, Rosemary. “Margaret Atwood and Wacousta [The Forest and the Trees].” Brick: A Literary Journal 29 (winter 1987): 43—46.

Wong, Rita. “Decolonizasian: Reading Asian and First Nations Relations in Literature.” Canadian Literature 199 (winter 2008): 158-81.

Publication Information for Republished Essays xi

Introduction: Ecocriticism North of the Forty-ninth Parallel

1. FAMILIAR TERRAIN? A RETROSPECTIVE APPRAISAL

The advent of ecocriticism has been hailed as one of the most timely and provocative developments in literary and cultural studies in recent decades. Ecocriticism has also been greeted with bewilderment or skepticism by critics, theorists, and students for whom its aims and methods are unclear. A sense of uncertainty sometimes attends discussions of ecocriticism even today, when it has become a relatively institutionalized part of academic life; an ever-growing array of publications, conferences, and classes are devoted to the subject. Ecocriticism has sought since its inception to make the study of literature (and other cultural manifestations) relevant to the innumerable environmental crises, local and global, that characterized the end of the twentieth century and that threaten to define the twenty-first. The powerful appeal of ecocriticism derives in xiii part from its longstanding commitment to interdisciplinarity and pragmatism. It claims for the analysis of literary and other cultural works a prominent role in addressing some of the most pressing matters of the day, and it aims to inflect conventional approaches to humanistic inquiry with scientific knowledge and an activist commitment to the protection or amelioration of the world’s environmental health. Ecocriticism seeks as well to address the social issues that are concomitant with environmental issues. But the precise ways in which literary studies bear on the material world remain perpetual subjects of debate, as do the most appropriate methods and most pertinent topics of ecocritical investigation. Ecocriticism aspires to understand and often to celebrate the natural world, yet it does so indirectly, by focussing primarily on written texts. ‘The critic in the library may seem engaged in a project altogether different from those of scientists in the field or the laboratory. Practitioners of ecocriticism seldom agree even on definitions of foundational terms, “nature” and “environment” foremost among them. (“Literature,” too, is often a contested category.) Ecocriticism continues to be shaped by perennial disagreements about its scope and purpose; such tensions reflect its mutability and suggest that it is an area of inquiry distinguished by vibrant debate and great potential for expansion.

By all the measures of scholarly consensus, ecocriticism is now an established — and perhaps even familiar — part of the academy. But for readers of this book who are new to the field, questions may persist. What exactly is ecocriticism? What do ecocritical scholars do, and what shapes do their efforts take? Readers who are already engaged in ecocriticism as scholars, teachers, and students may have questions of their own. What is particularly Canadian about ecocriticism, its intellectual energy, and its internal quarrels? How can a retrospective, curatorial account of the field shape future approaches to the environmental humanities? To these important questions may be added another: Where is ecocriticism? That riddle and the manifold answers to which it may lead are the subjects of this book, which attempts to bring into view the development of ecocriticism in the context of studies of Canadian literature. One response is that ecocriticism is Jere — in Canada, in Canadian studies — and has been xiv ELLA SOPER AND NICHOLAS BRADLEY for some time. ‘The slippery, almost intractable meaning of here, moreover, has wielded a significant influence on the concerns and conclusions of environmentally oriented scholars of Canadian literature. Despite the global scale of environmental phenomena and the increasingly international character of the environmental humanities, the emergence of ecocriticism has followed different trajectories in various regional, national, cultural, and linguistic settings. The aim of Greening the Maple: Canadian Ecocriticism in Context is to track the past and present of Canadian ecocriticism. Revisiting recent critical history may well permit a richer sense of the directions in which environmental approaches to Canadian literature may lead.

Ecocriticism can be described in very general terms as the investigation of the many ways in which culture and the environment — the realm that both includes and exceeds the human — are interrelated and conceptualized. It has tended, especially at its outset, to focus on literary representations of the natural world, concentrating for understandable reasons on the works of writers, such as Wordsworth and Thoreau, for whom nature is a central and beloved subject. But increasingly ecocriticism is diverse in its concerns and techniques, and in the intellectual traditions that it claims. As Lawrence Buell writes, ecocriticism “has a history Jo¢h of strong position-taking by individual spokespersons and of reluctance to insist on a single normative, programmatic definition of its rightful scope, method, and stakes.” Representation as such has largely receded into the background as a subject of examination; “nature,” “wilderness,” “environment,” and their cognates have become highly disputed, and in some cases eviscerated, terms and concepts. And it has become a widely accepted view that all texts have an environmental dimension, not only those that are self-evidently about nature. A corollary of this view is the conviction that any text may be illuminated by critical attention to its environmental aspects.

The essays collected in this volume together demonstrate that, although “ecocriticism” is a broad and somewhat vague if now generally accepted term, studies of Canadian literature have long made relations between people and environments a topic of primary importance.

Introduction xu

(“Eco-” suggests “ecology,” which has a range of scientific, political, and philosophical connotations. Is the ecology of ecocriticism a metaphor? A biological concept? A statement of political orientation? These are vital questions.) The chapters create a dialogue among literary studies of nature in Canada that predate, coincide with, participate in, and follow the rise of ecocriticism proper. The sweeping statements about nature and Canadian identity made by critics in the era of Northrop Frye’s The Bush Garden and Margaret Atwood’s Survival will probably strike readers today as naive,? but contemporary ecocritical approaches to Canadian literature and culture are not wholly separate from earlier critical and cultural fascinations with nature. If Frye and Atwood are not strictly ecological thinkers, their works nonetheless helped establish a context for later ecological criticism. The continuities and ruptures alike in Canadian studies show “nature” to be a pivotal yet shifting and unstable concept and site of investigation.

An enduring stereotype holds that Canadian literature revolves around descriptions of nature: in novel after novel, and poem after poem, rugged mountains, whirling snowstorms, and desolate prairies torment hapless characters. There may be some truth to the stereotype, but Canadian writers have long tried to understand the nature of nature — the constitution and character of wilderness and countryside — as well as to represent its effects, harmful or otherwise, on people. In 1903 the poet Bliss Carman asked “who shall prove that nature is not a metaphor?,” thus associating the non-human world (“nature”) with literary language (“metaphor”) and suggesting that what seems real is in fact the product of discourse.’ Carman’s reputation as poet and critic is at present fairly low; even if his historical importance is assumed, he has few champions today. But his rhetorical question provides an example to counter the view that Canadian writers have been oblivious to the complexity of nature as both fact and fiction, and it allows a connection, faint perhaps but nevertheless discernible, between his conception of an illusory nature and contemporary understandings of nature’s discursive existence. Recent critical propositions that “nature” is an ideological construction rather than a tangible, material reality remain divisive in the world of xvui ELLA SOPER AND NICHOLAS BRADLEY ecocriticism. As the provocative cases of Timothy Morton's Ecology without Nature (2007) and The Ecological Thought (2010) illustrate,* describing “nature” as a socially and linguistically determined category invites a defensive response from some quarters of the ecocritical community, in which sophisticated theory is perceived to be inimical to environmentalist praxis.* Morton’s opposition to “nature” — taken as a reified, politically suspect idea — may seem counterintuitive in a field that is committed to understanding and improving human relations with the natural realm, and his ideas have been both acclaimed and reviled. His support of object-oriented ontology as a philosophical alternative to what he describes as “theistic” responses to environmental crisis extends his advocacy of “a ruthless rejection of the concept of Nature.” Morton’s polemical (but playful) style and the challenging substance of his ideas have made him a polarizing figure — so, too, have been other writers who have questioned the conceptual validity of “nature” and “wilderness.” The gulf between poets such as Carman and critics such as Morton is undoubtedly wide. But the congruence of such distant views as theirs suggests the extent to which the subject that ecocriticism purports to examine — nature — has always been contentious.

In Canadian literature and literary criticism, theoretical reflection upon the natural world and upon the role of language and literature in describing, imagining, and constituting nature has a lengthy past. Carman’s speculation is merely an example; the essays gathered in this volume indicate repeatedly that “nature” has frequently been a troubled term in Canadian letters and that “theory” in some form has rarely, if ever, been far removed from literary encounters with nature. Virtually from the inception of the notion of a Canadian national literature, nature has occupied a central place in critical conversations. As Laurie Ricou suggests, “Canadian literary studies, with their long-standing interest in nature, wilderness, and landscape, might be said to have always been ecocritical.”® The essays in this book suggest the accuracy of Ricou’s somewhat tentative claim, showing that venerable critical interests contextualize and inform current ecocritical models. For Canadian writers at least since the Confederation period, for regionalist and thematic

Introduction xvii critics, and, most recently, for ecocritics, the value, symbolism, integrity, and ontology of nature were and remain fundamental matters. (Which is not to say that such subjects have not also been found trite: Canadian writing about nature has always had detractors.) In his “Conclusion” to the Literary History of Canada (1965), a landmark essay, Frye several times suggests that an agonistic relation to the landscape defines Canadian culture; he notes that a characteristic of Canadian poetry is a predominant “tone of deep terror in regard to nature.” This hypothesis, surely one of Frye’s most notorious observations about Canadian writing, epitomizes the centrality of nature in Canadian cultural discourse, albeit in negative terms. ‘The idea of a “garrison mentality,” probably his most familiar single phrase about Canadian society, likewise captures the sense of hostility to the environment that ostensibly defines the Canadian psyche.” Frye’s writing on Canadian literature and culture continues to be a critical touchstone, despite the strenuous efforts of waves of critics who have resisted the emphasis on literary theme and overarching claims about the country, which inevitably seem inadequate when examined closely.

Critical treatments of nature in Canadian literature from Frye’s era, a heyday of literary nationalism in Canada and of thematic criticism (on which more below), may appear thoroughly outmoded. ‘The literature about which Frye wrote so persuasively may also seem outdated. Ideas of Canadian literary history and traditions have been transformed since his day; the explosion of literary activity in Canada since the 1960s, the resultant range of literary subjects and forms, and the diversification of authorship have made comprehensive descriptions of Canadian writing virtually impossible. But aesthetic and conceptual complexities exist even in apparently familiar territory, and connections may be found between past critical models and current intellectual fashions. ‘This anthology attempts to survey the intricacies of Canadian environmental criticism, and to emphasize both continuity and change. It provides a narrative of the emergence of Canadian ecocritical discourse. Taking seriously the challenge implicit in Susie O’Brien’s question of whether there is “a substantial body of what might be called ‘Canadian ecocriticism’ lurking xviii ELLA SOPER AND NICHOLAS BRADLEY under names other than ‘Canadian’ or ‘ecocritical,” it collects significant statements on Canadian literature from 1965 onward (with one earlier exception)." The anthology is necessarily selective and provisional, but it seeks to exemplify attributes of the large and varied body of environmental approaches to Canadian writing. The chapters that follow demonstrate that “Canadian ecocriticism” is a capacious term. Just as Canadian literature is amorphous — multilingual, multicultural, multiregional — Canadian criticism has investigated the representation and discursive production of natural environments in a panoply of ways. The maple leaf at the centre of the Canadian flag is, of course, red. The essays herein together suggest that the maple’s green leaves are a fitting symbol of a dimension of Canadian criticism.

2. ECOCRITICISM: THEN, NOW, HERE

Ecocriticism still has a relatively short official history — “official” in contrast to the protracted history of critical interest in nature and related concepts, such as the pastoral mode. In the early 1990s, some literary critics felt it imperative to respond to environmental crises: ecocriticism emerged from this moment, its beginnings reflective of the perceived immediacy and severity of environmental change, and of what was thought to be the need for scholars in humanistic disciplines to make the environment the prime object of study. Thus an activist impulse has informed ecocritical practice from the outset. By the end of the 1990s, ecocriticism had achieved some prominence as a distinct approach to literary studies, especially in the United States and the United Kingdom, even as it had clear ties to other forms of green cultural studies. In its early stages, ecocriticism was strongly shaped by accounts of British Romantic poetry — notably Jonathan Bate’s Romantic Ecology and Karl Kroeber’s Ecological Literary Criticism? — and of American literature in a vein that encompasses the Transcendentalist writers of the nineteenth century and the writers of the twentieth century who follow paths established by Emerson and Thoreau. The development and institutionalization of

Introduction xix ecocriticism were closely tied to American literature and the American academy — or at least to its periphery. The Western Literature Association, a respected but specialized scholarly body, gave rise to the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE), which was established in 1992. The nascent ecocritical project, in this manifestation, made central the Transcendentalist legacy, contemporary American essayists, and, for evident reasons, American environments. The nearly overwhelming influence of Thoreau as a literary and philosophical point of reference made Walden Pond one of the sacred locations of the new field, just as Wordsworth’s Lake District was fundamentally important to an emergent ecocriticism that took British forms of Romanticism as points of departure. As Lawrence Buell has observed, early ecocriticism claimed “two semi-coordinated and interpenetrating epicenters: British romanticism, with a genre focus especially on poetry in that tradition (including its twentieth-century Anglo-American filiations), and U.S. nature writing (ditto), with a genre focus especially on the Thoreauvian imprint,” even if “few ecocritics, if pressed about the matter, would have claimed that these particular generic and historical foci were to be considered the sole rightful provinces for ecocritical work.” Buell’s second point is especially significant. The “epicenters” may never have been understood to define ecocriticism — to establish its lexicon, to provide the solitary models of environmentally astute and relevant literature, to create a normative vision of nature, and so on — yet their importance to the developing field can hardly be overstated. Many studies that anticipated and thus shaped ecocriticism in its later forms, especially in the United States, emerged from American literary scholarship, such as Leo Marx’s The Machine in the Garden, Joseph W. Meeker’s The Comedy of Survival, and William Rueckert’s “Literature and Ecology.” Perhaps the most important of such works is Buell’s The Environmental Imagination, which tied historical approaches to Thoreau to the burgeoning literary interest in contemporary environmentalism." Its publication in 1995 provided American ecocriticism with an anchoring critical study, one that cast Thoreau as a focal figure in environmental literature and philosophy and that, in turn, placed environmental concerns at the heart of an Amerixx ELLA SOPER AND NICHOLAS BRADLEY can literary tradition. While early ecocritics may not have intended their thematic, generic, and authorial emphases to become rigid paradigms — Buell notes that “the initial de facto concentration on selected literary genres within the long Anglo-American nineteenth century was contingent rather than inherent” — they have nonetheless exerted considerable influence on the field at large, even as ecocriticism has become planetary in scope and practice.

The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology, published the year after The Environmental Imagination, is commonly understood to mark the culmination of ecocriticism’s first phase. The anthology demonstrated the existence of a coherent body of environmentally oriented criticism and provided templates for further studies. The editors, Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm, gave a succinct definition of the field that their book would, at least for a time, represent: ecocriticism is “the study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment.””” This description is broad — each of its chief terms is open to interpretation — yet powerful in its simply phrased suggestion that relations between literature and the environment form the basis of ecocriticism, whatever shapes it may take. The Ecocriticism Reader revisited and revised the literary canon, proposing the significance of often-overlooked writers belonging to various traditions understood to have environmental (and environmentalist) resonance. The anthology confirmed (to ecocritics) and asserted (to other readers) that ecocriticism was a viable mode of inquiry with a constituency of practitioners, with clear aims and interpretative strategies, and with institutional authority. Subsequent accounts of ecocriticism’s history have almost uniformly pointed to the publication of The Ecocriticism Reader as the moment of the field’s arrival.'® The book’s importance and continued relevance are undeniable, but from a specifically Canadianist perspective, its lack of attention to Canadian literature is notable: the anthology does not examine Canadian writers and their works.” Its essays focus almost exclusively on American writers and representations of American locations; the impression is created, however inadvertently, that ecocriticism is (or was) principally an American enterprise. (Ecocriticism has since the mid-1990s generally

Introduction xxi become international in scope.) A Canadian equivalent of The Ecocriticism Reader could serve as a belated corrective, concentrating on the Canadian literature that the anthology appeared to overlook. Perhaps more significant than a remedial or additive approach, however, would be an investigation of the particularities of Canadian approaches to the study of literature and the environment, which intersect with, as well as differ from, environmental criticism as understood and practised elsewhere. The present volume attempts to provide some evidence for such an investigation. Greening the Maple seeks to suggest that environmental approaches to Canadian literature represent not merely a branch of the American or the British tree, but instead, to shift metaphors, a different but related species. Canadian ecocriticism has, it may be said, a somewhat ironic relation to its American and British equivalents: it is as Canadian as possible, under the circumstances.”!

The internationalization of ecocriticism since the 1990s has made it evident that ecocritical practices are not the same the world over, and that not all literatures — national, regional, local — adhere to or accord with theories derived from British, American, or indeed other literary traditions. Environmental approaches to Canadian literature may, in short, be considered independently of other nationally inflected versions of ecocriticism. The purported “topocentrism” of Canadian literature” and the unmistakable emphasis on wilderness in Canadian iconography” — the myriad representations of nature that circulate in Canadian arts, letters, politics, and other envisionings of the nation — have influenced, often strongly, studies of environment in Canadian writing. The persistent conception in political rhetoric and popular culture of Canada as the True North, strong and free, suggests the close relation of nature and nation. Canadian ecocriticism, guided by the many distinctive features of Canadian cultures and places, has tended to be pluralist. It has demonstrated strong connections to British and American ideas, but it has also attended closely to Canadian cultural traditions of imagining the natural world. It has acknowledged, too, the existence of a domestic ecocriticism avant /a lettre. Among its notable characteristics may be counted a distinct emphasis on poetry as well as on non-fictional nature xxii ELLA SOPER AND NICHOLAS BRADLEY writing (the journal Canadian Poetry has been an especially important ecocritical forum”); the existence of both ecocriticism and /’écocritique (sometimes interconnected, sometimes two solitudes); a longstanding fascination with animals that differs from, yet complements, the critical turn to “the question of the animal” in posthumanist studies; and a continual interest in the intersections of political theories and environmental politics.

Such characteristics neither define Canadian ecocriticism exhaustively nor mark its absolute distinction from ecocriticism elsewhere. They suggest, however, some of the topics to which conversations about literature and environment in Canada have often returned. It may seem parochial to focus on a national variation of ecocriticism when the field has largely moved beyond the concerns of its first inceptions. The interconnectedness of environments and economies is, after all, an inescapable aspect of life in the twenty-first century — global climate change and global capitalism are ineluctable and interrelated phenomena. Images of the planet at risk make narrowly conceived understandings of nature seem irrelevant or untenable.” Locally focussed critical models can, however, coexist with forms of “eco-cosmopolitan”” inquiry: authors, texts, environments, and even readers can be illuminated by a variety of interpretative paradigms. In other words, national (but neither essentialist nor isolationist) approaches to the study of literature and the environment can complement (rather than preclude) other approaches in a constellation of ecocritical modes. ‘The “transnational turn”? in ecocritical scholarship, as Scott Slovic has suggested,” shows that a comparative paradigm is a powerful means of conceiving of ecocriticism as the sum of its various national strains.*° The proliferation of various national affiliates of the U.S.-based ASLE suggests further that ecocriticism has become at once global and local, simultaneously cosmopolitan, national, regional, and local in its manifestations.*! Ursula K. Heise suggested some years ago that ecocriticism had become sufficiently complex that it required “book-length introductions.” This observation becomes ever more apt as time passes. The history of environmental approaches to Canadian literature has, however, scarcely been examined, even as the existence of lively ecocritical debates and

Introduction xxiii of an established community of scholars has been noted. As a result, valuable contributions have at times been insufficiently recognized. The older essays in this volume will be familiar to some readers and new to others; their presence in the book is based on a belief in their continued relevance.

3. CANADIAN ENVIRONMENTAL WRITING: SOME GENERAL OBSERVATIONS

Canadian landscapes and their apparent distinctiveness (whether understood in positive or negative terms) have fascinated writers and critics throughout the history of literature in Canada, before as well as after Confederation. A preoccupation with nature is a widely acknowledged (and, yes, somewhat stereotypical) characteristic of Canadian literature. Celebrations and condemnations of natural settings, and evocations of the spirits of places appear frequently in Canadian letters, as critics have on occasion lamented. The recurring, if not constant, attention to nature has, of course, salient historical and political dimensions. The dread of nature and the reverence for it that are both evident in Canadian literature can be understood in terms of Canada’s relations to Britain, France, and the United States, and to a degree to other countries as well. In Canadian literature in English and French, aesthetic conventions “imported” from beyond the national borders have had remarkable staying power.” As Susan Glickman demonstrates in The Picturesque and the Sublime,* a fascinating account of the roles that the titular aesthetic categories have played in Canadian writing, traditional European philosophies and styles, and especially notions of nature’s beauty and terror, have had far-reaching and multifarious effects on the literature of this country. But such perspectives — neoclassical, Romantic, colonial, and so on — coexist, in Canadian literary history, with both older and more recent attitudes toward the natural world. Don McKay, a highly influential poet and essayist, suggests in a powerful account of Canadian nature poetry, for instance, that environmental contrasts between xxiu ELLA SOPER AND NICHOLAS BRADLEY the Old World and the New World created an aesthetic challenge for early Canadian writers in particular: “Neither the Enlightenment values of rational order nor the Romantic ideal of a humane and humanizing nature easily applies to the country which greeted — if that’s the word — the pioneers.” In the late twentieth century and the early twenty-first, writers have become highly aware of dramatic environmental changes and crises both local and global, and often self-conscious about their apparent belatedness as “nature writers” or “nature poets” in a seemingly post-natural age. Yet conventional ways of seeing the natural world have remained influential. (McKay’s own writing is an apposite example: it engages the legacy of Romantic nature poetry while savvily demonstrating its author’s knowledge of twentieth-century philosophy.)

Canadian literary responses to the natural world have sometimes, but not always, yoked together a sense of novelty with familiar modes of expression, using received forms to describe “new” places, flora and fauna, climates, and, to be sure, peoples. Before and after Confederation, Canadian writers have evoked local conditions in a literary climate in which generic and formal models established elsewhere have held sway. Many writers have found such models suitable for their purposes; others have chafed at the apparent contradictions between aesthetic conventions and the seeming newness or unfamiliarity of Canadian landscapes. Literary respondents to Canadian environments have attempted to discover or invent vocabularies and literary forms appropriate to the scale and the particularities of the country.** This dynamic of simultaneous literary adaptation and invention, with a discordant variety of results, is perhaps inevitable whenever languages and ideas are highly mobile — that is, whenever historical and political circumstances allow or cause their movement. Historical differences between Canada and other settler-invader countries (including the United States, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa) nonetheless bear upon the distinctions that may be observed between Canadian environmental writing and commentary and other related ecological traditions, including those of the United States, Canada’s neighbour and perpetual point of comparison. As W. H. New suggests, the “verbal trope” of “land” enjoys a paradoxical

Introduction XXU quality in Canadian culture, functioning “both as an icon of stability and as a medium of change.” Much the same can be said of “nature” in Canada, which has been perceived as both terrifyingly different and reassuringly familiar. (Among other things, as the chapters in this book demonstrate.)

Linda Hutcheon has suggested that “Canada has been — has had to be — sensitive to issues of difference and exploitation: it defined itself as a nation (a bilingual and bicultural one) in 1867, but it continued to be a colony of Britain until, some would say, it graduated to being a colony of the United States.”** Canadian writers have frequently attended to cultural, linguistic, and idiomatic variations in their efforts to express Canadian sensibilities in light of the country’s colonial and postcolonial history. They have struggled to decide on appropriate subjects and on the appropriate language with which to convey them: literary languages in Canada include English and French, in various registers, as well as many indigenous and “foreign” languages. The names of places illustrate the important difference that language makes in relation to physical space. Think of “the Queen Charlotte Islands” and “Haida Gwaii,” or “the Strait of Georgia” and “the Salish Sea”: these are and are not the same places. The tremendous “transnational and global currency”® of Canada’s diasporic literature provides another context for the study of Canadian environments. ‘The formal and idiomatic strategies used by Canadian writers of non-European origins to represent Canada, and notably its urban spaces, link the cultural dimensions of diasporic experiences to ecological dimensions, as Canadian locations are imagined in relation to homelands, places of exile, and other sites of memory, identity, presence, and absence.*°