In 1917 Canadian literature made its first appearance in The Cambridge History of English Literature as a modest twenty-page chapter entitled “English-Canadian Literature” by Toronto academic Pelham Edgar, along with a series of other chapters on literatures of the Empire like “Anglo-Irish Literature,” “Anglo-Indian Literature,” “The Literature of Australia and New Zealand,” and “South African Poetry.” Almost exactly ninety years later, this substantial Cambridge History of Canadian Literature, co-edited by two women scholars, with its thirty-one chapters written by a distinguished company of Canadian and international contributors, offers convincing evidence for the establishment of Canadian literature as an important scholarly field and for its current standing. Between then and now there have been numerous literary histories, encyclopedias, and anthologies in English and French, produced in a continual process of inventory-taking on the state of the nation and its literature.

Interestingly, these have been concentrated in particular periods of national crisis or celebration, notably in the post-war 1920s, in the decade of cultural nationalism centered on the Centennial of the Canadian Confederation in 1967, and most recently since the mid-1990s with its radical reassessments of the nation and its literary heritage. This Cambridge History of Canadian Literature is situated in the context of newly defined discourses of nationhood, national culture, and literary production which are both specific to Canada and related to larger theoretical questions which have widened the parameters of nation, history, and literature.