“Where is Here?”: Literary Nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s

WHILE AT THE BEGINNING of the twentieth century literary theory and criticism had been busy tackling the question of whether there was a genuinely Canadian literature at all, a new cultural self-awareness arose in the late 1950s. As internationally Canada was poised between the traditional model of Great Britain and the overwhelming cultural, economic, and political influence of the United States, cultural unity and selfconfidence in its own literary and cultural achievements developed slowly. Unlike the United States, Canada lacked founding myths and master narratives that could be applied to the nation as a whole because of the intranational dualism of English Canada and Quebec. Anglophone literary theory in the 1960s has to be understood as a reaction to both Quebec's Quiet Revolution, which triggered social reforms and sparked nationalism in Quebec, as well as to the publication of the Massey Report (1951), which displayed anti-American tendencies and conjured up a new Canadian nationalism, especially in English Canada. The Massey Report — named after its chairman Vincent Massey (1887–1967) — was the work of an independent committee that advised the Canadian government in the improvement of the arts, letters, and sciences. It maintained that from the time of the Second World War Canada's national identity had neither been threatened by economical nor political forces but instead by the predominance of a commercialized U.S. American mass culture. This cultural critique caused a stir in Canada and in 1957 gave rise to the foundation of the Canada Council.