Canadian literature

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The term Canadian literature commonly refers to prose, poetry, drama in both English and French from Canada . The traditional literatures of the indigenous peoples , the Esquimaux ( Inuit , Innu . Yupik ) and the other First Nations are not counted as Canadian literature by the German-speaking scientific community , but by the German-language book publishers when they publish such authors. In contrast, Canada will be represented as a guest of honor at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2020 with all of the country's languages, i.e. English, French, the languages ​​of the indigenous peoples and the Inuit.

features

Canadian literature is shaped by the coexistence and coexistence of Anglo-Canadian and French-Canadian literature (s) as well as the influences of numerous minorities . Common subjects, motifs and stylistic elements are:

The official multilingualism of Canada also affects the design of the characters and their interactions , especially verbatim (which in turn can lead to difficulties in translating Canadian literature into other languages).
The author Hugh MacLennan describes this phenomenon in the preface to his novel The Two Solitudes (1945): Some of the characters in his book presumably speak only English and others only French, while many are bilingual . He points out that there is not a single word in Canada that satisfactorily describes the two groups of whites indigenous to the country with a single term. While the Francophones almost always meant themselves with the word Canadien (French: Canadians), they would call their Anglophone fellow citizens les Anglais (French: the English). The Anglophones, on the other hand, would call themselves Canadians , their francophone fellow citizens French-Canadians .

Anglo-Canadian literature

Thomas Chandler Haliburton
Lucy Maud Montgomery (around 1897). Her children's and young people's book Anne of Green Gables (2008) about an unconventional orphan girl who gets his way through has been published 32 times in five years and is widely distributed in English-speaking countries. The last of nine volumes in the series was not published posthumously until 1974.

The Anglo-Canadian writers were influenced by literary developments in the colonial motherland , followed by influences from the United States and the literatures of the numerous countries of origin - by immigrants who now write in English or French. The latter z. B. are immigrants from Lebanon, Vietnam, Haiti or West Africa.

One of the first Canadian writers is Thomas Chandler Haliburton (1796–1865), who however died two years before the country was founded. One of his most important works is the humorous character sketch The Clockmaker (1838). In addition to the early settler literature of the generation who still immigrated from Europe, exemplified by Susanna Moodies Life in the clearing versus the bush (1853) and Catharine Parr Traills The Backwoods of Canada (1837), historical and romance novels based on English models were created. This is how John Richardson orientated himself in his novel Wacousta, published in 1832 ; or The Prophecy. A Tale of the Canadas based on Walter Scott's example . Born in England, William Kirby set his historical novel The Golden Dog (1877) in Québec and incorporated many local legends and locations from the French-speaking part of Canada into it.

The authors of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, mostly born in Canada, also wrote about the pioneering life on the North American frontier ( Sheila Watson's Deep Hollow Creek ), about the size, potential and natural beauty of the country (Bliss Carman and Francis Reginald Scott - a socialist activist also known as Frank Scott), about the development of individual immigrant groups in Dominion Canada ( Laura Goodman Salverson's The Viking Heart ) and about the simple manners, beliefs and aspirations of ordinary people ( Stephen Leacock , Lucy Maud Montgomery ). Carman and his cousin Charles GD Roberts lived in the United States for a long time. because at that time in Canada you could hardly live off your income as an author.

With the outbreak of the First World War, the relationship to the ›Old World‹ and the influence of the war on immigrants came into focus, for example in the works of the daughter of Icelandic immigrants Laura Goodman Salverson ( The Viking Heart , The Dark Weaver ).

Margaret Atwood in Stockholm (2015)

After the Second World War , u. a. Mordecai Richler ( The Apprenticeship Of Duddy Kravitz ), Timothy Findley , Mavis Gallant , Margaret Laurence ( The Stone Angel ), Irving Layton , Norman Levine , who in Canada made me (1958) always criticized the provinciality of Canada, and especially Sheila Watson The Double Hook (1959) about social disintegration in a small village in British Columbia introduced modernist impulses into Canadian literature. The split relationship between Anglo- and Francophone Canadians became the subject of u. a. in Hugh MacLennan's Two Solitudes . Leonard Cohen provided the first postmodern impetus in 1966 with Beautiful Losers . Michael Ondaatje received the prestigious Governor General's Award for Poetry in 1970 . The jazz novel Coming through Slaughter (1976), but especially the Toronto novel In the Skin of a Lion (1987), were recognized early works. The English Patient (1992) and its film adaptation made him internationally known.

With the Southern Ontario Gothic , an independent subgenre of the Gothic Novel developed , in which the life in Southern Ontario and the Protestant mentality of its residents are at the center of criticism. Its most important representatives include Margaret Atwood , Robertson Davies , Marian Engel , Barbara Gowdy , Jane Urquhart and the Nobel Prize winner for literature, Alice Munro , who revolutionized the structure of short stories. In addition to numerous Canadian prizes and the Booker Prize (2009), she was honored with the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2013 . Margaret Atwood's most important works include her analysis of Canada's will to survive, Survival (1972), the volume of poetry The Journals of Susanna Moodie (1970), which deals with the same subject, and her novel Surfacing (1972), in German The Long Dream . Surfacing has been described as "a key work in Canadian literature"; this was Atwood's international breakthrough. Jane Urquhart is from Northern Ontario . Her first novel, The Whirlpool (1986), was the first Canadian book to receive the French Prix ​​du Meilleur Livre Etranger (prize for the best foreign novel) in 1992 . The Underpainter received the 1997 Governor General's Award for Fiction.

In the 1990s and early 2000s , numerous new authors succeeded, including a. Caroline Adderson ( Pleased to Meet You , The Sky is Falling ), Joseph Boyden ( Three Day Road , The Orenda ), Lynn Coady ( Hellgoing , The Antagonist - German: "Abgeschritten" 2012), Douglas Coupland ( Generation X , Marshall McLuhan : You Know Nothing of My Work! ), Bill Gaston ( Gargoyles ), Lawrence Hill ( The Book of Negroes ), Yann Martel ( The Facts behind the Helsinki Roccamatios; Life of Pi ), Anne Michaels ( Fugitive Pieces ), Nino Ricci ( Lives of the Saints ) and David Adams Richards, who published nearly 30 books ( Mercy Among the Children , Lines on the Water: A Fisherman's Life on the Miramichi ). Carol Shields was born in Illinois, married a Canadian in 1957, and lived and worked in Canada until her death in 2003. Like Margaret Atwood, she studied Susanna Moodie extensively and wrote a number of award-winning novels, including a. the Pulitzer Prize book The Stone Diaries (1993; German: Das Tagebuch der Daisy Goodwill ), Larry's Party (1997) and Unless (2002; German The Story of Reta Winters ), which was nominated for the Scotiabank Giller Prize . Postmodern Anglophone Canadian literature draws on feminist, ethnocentric, and deconstructivist approaches and thus works very independently alongside US American literature.

French-Canadian literature

Eastern Canada was first colonized by French settlers as New France . After the expansion of British rule, Québec remained the only region on the North American mainland with a French-speaking majority and, as such, has shaped Canadian literature. Many French-Canadian authors were stylistically influenced by French writers , among others. a. by Honoré de Balzac . However, the spread of the French language was hampered until the 1860s.

Le chercheur de trésors ou L'influence d'un livre (1837) by Philippe-Ignace Aubert de Gaspé (1814–1841) is considered the first French-Canadian novel. In 1842 Antoine Gérin-Lajoie published the patriotic song Un Canadien errant about the rebels of the uprising in South Québec 1837/38, who were sentenced to death or who fled into exile, which is still played at numerous folk and rock festivals and distributed on albums. Even Louis-Honoré Fréchette had in the 1860s in exile in the United States dodge, where he La voix d'un exilé wrote, and did not return until 1871 back.

La Chasse-galerie or The Flying Canoe . Preliminary study by Henri Julien (1906) for a painting for the popular book of the same name by Honoré Beaugrand ( Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec ).

A genre popular for almost a hundred years was the historical novel . The poet Octave Crémazie , who was celebrated as “poète national” in the 1850s, also worked with historical materials. Honoré Beaugrand collected local legends and sagas - partly syntheses from old French and Indian motifs and stories . William Chapman became known as a romantic lyric poet .

An important genre in the late 19th century and on into the 1940s was the roman du terroir . This celebrates rural life as a counterpoint to industrialization . Patrice Lacombe's The Paternal Farm (1846) is considered to be the first roman du terroir . The genre was reinforced in the 1860s by the theoretical setting of the Abbé Henri-Raymond Casgrain . Casgrain, the first literary theorist from Québec, saw Catholic morality and patriotism as the highest goals of literature. His essay Le mouvement littéraire en Canada (1866) served as a guideline for many French-Canadian authors for decades. The novel Maria Chapdelaine by Louis Hémon , published in 1916 , only became a success in France years after the author's death and became an emblematic model of the agricultural movement, to which Félix-Antoine Savard also contributed with his patriotic book Menaud maître-draveur about a raftsman (1937 ) counted.

The first French-Canadian novelist was Laure Conan , who u. a. wrote the psychological novel Angéline de Montbrun (1884). It was not until the 1930s that there was a stronger turn to psychologically and socially critical forms of novels. Gabrielle Roy and Anne Hébert brought French-Canadian literature its first international recognition. Gabrielle Roy was one of the representatives of the tranquille revolution , which broke with the rural-conservative-Catholic tradition and took up issues of urban life. She is one of the most important Canadian authors of the post-war era. Her novel Bonheur d'occasion (1947) was also extremely successful as The Tin Flute in the USA . Alexandre Chenevert (1954) is considered one of the most important works of psychological realism in Canadian literature. Your work was u. a. Three times the Governor General's Award for Fiction (1947, 1957, 1978). As a result, there was a further upswing with authors such as Antonine Maillet and Roch Carrier, whereby the cultural and social tensions between the French and Anglo-Canadians also increased got the look. An experimental branch of literature in Québéc developed u. a. the feminist poet Nicole Brossard and the novelists Hubert Aquin and Gérard Bessette ( Nouveau roman ).

Marie Claire Blais at the Book Fair in Montreal 2010. Her novel Une Saison dans la vie d'Emmanuel (1965) is about the childhood and youth of the 16th child of a matriarchal-dominated peasant family.

In the late 1970s, the (Anglophone) literary scholar Susan Joan Wood and the science fiction author Judith Merril helped the Studies of Feminist Science Fiction to gain recognition - which, among other things, was a. was reflected in the founding of the French-Canadian science fiction magazine Solaris .

Other multiple award-winning French-Canadian authors are Marie-Claire Blais , who can almost be seen as a representative of anti- terroir literature, Yves Beauchemin and Antonine Maillet. Other important authors are the poet Hector de Saint-Denys Garneau , the novelist Jacques Poulin and the playwright Michel Tremblay , who brought the Joual (the colloquial language of the working class of Québec) to the stage. In her two novels, which have been translated into German, Jocelyne Saucier traces people whose lives deviate noticeably from the normality of other citizens. In Never Without Her, an extended Quebec family of 23 people dispersed around the world after the explosion in an ore mine, only to come together again after 30 years and finally to tackle the old trauma.

Minority literature

Canadian peculiarities are the anglophone internal minority in francophone Québec and the francophone minority in the rest of Canada. For example, the Anglophone poets Louis Dudek and Irving Layton and the novelists Hugh MacLennan and Mordecai Richler lived in Montreal, Province of Québec. Leonard Cohen , who became known as an author even before his music career , also comes from the Anglophone Jewish part of Montreal .

In 1967, the Canadian government increased financial support for publishers, which resulted in a large increase in small publishers across the country. After Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau's Announcement of Implementation of Policy of Multiculturalism within Bilingual Framework in 1971, Canada's literary scene became even more diverse.

The successful authors of the immigrant minorities include Marie-Célie Agnant (from Haiti ), Ryad Assani-Razaki (from Benin ), Clark Blaise (from the United States ), Adrienne Clarkson (from Hong Kong ), Rawi Hage and Wajdi Mouawad (both from the Lebanon ), Erin Mouré (from Galicia ), Joy Nozomi Nakayama (Japanese community), Samuel Selvon Dickson (from Trinidad and Tobago ), Russell Claude Smith (from South Africa ), Moyez G. Vassanji (from Kenya ), Henry Kreisel from Austria and Rudy Wiebe, of German descent, with Plautdietsch as his mother tongue. Dany Laferrière emigrated from Haiti to Canada in 1976 and became famous with his debut novel Comment faire l'amour avec un nègre sans se fatiguer . In 2009 his novel L'Énigme du retourder was awarded the French Prix ​​Médicis literary prize. In 2013 he became the first Canadian (and first Haitian) to be elected a member of the Académie française . Arif Anwar comes from Bangladesh and is dedicated to the history of his homeland.

There are a small number of German-language writers in the country who are counted as Canadian authors by the government, even if the place of publication may be in Germany, e.g. B. Walter Bauer .

Literature of the autochthonous peoples

First Nations writers have become increasingly prominent since official support for a policy of multiculturalism in the 1970s. After Norval Morrisseau (1932–2007) started out with legends ( Ojibwa Legends of My People , 1965), poetic works by the chief of the Burrard Dan George and Mi'kmaq Rita Joe ( My Heart Soars , 1974; Poems of Rita Joe , 1978), but also political writings such as The Unjust Society: The Tragedy of Canada's Indians (1969, 2000) and The Rebirth of Canada's Indians (1977) by Cree Harold Cardinal (1945-2005).

Joséphine Bacon at the Manitou Festival in Mont-Tremblant (2017)

Despite the assurance of minority rights in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 1982, boarding schools for the cultural assimilation of autochthonous children were not abolished until 1996. This topic continues to concern the Innu author Joséphine Bacon , who was separated from her parents at the age of five; she publishes in English and in Innu-aimun , which is still spoken by over 10,000 people in Labrador and Québec. The innu musician Tanya Tagaq also wrote a novel about her experiences in such a residential home .

Inuk author Aviaq Johnston from Igloolik writes in English . Her debut novel Those Who Run in the Sky , which can be attributed to magical realism, won several awards in 2017. Virginia Pésémapeo Bordeleau (* 1951), who, among other things, caricatures the conflicts and symbioses between shamanism and the modern need for spirituality and also emerges as a painter, and Naomi Fontaine (* 1987), who in Kuessipan (2011 ), write novels and short stories in French ) describes the hard life of nomadic Innu. Innu Natasha Kanapé Fontaine (* 1991) became known as a poet and actress. Her subjects are civilization damage and identity crises of the Innu, who are much more assimilated compared to the Inuit. Wendat Jean Sioui (* 1948) and the anthropologist Louis-Karl Picard-Sioui (* 1976), who has also made a name for himself as a performance artist and graphic artist, work in a number of different genres .

Frankfurt Book Fair 2020

In 2019, there will be 260 publishers for English books and more than 100 for French books nationwide on the Canadian book market, plus products in minority languages. Over 8500 titles appear annually. The turnover in this market was Can $ 2 billion in 2018. The publisher Caroline Fortin , involved in Canada's appearances as a guest of honor at the Frankfurt Book Fairs 2020 and 2021, sees linguistic and ethnic diversity as a typical feature of Canada and a strength in international competition. The two appearances of Canada in 2020 (from March 2020 only virtual) and 2021 are under the motto Singulier Pluriel - Singular Plurality (a unique variety).

Because of the COVID-19 pandemic in Germany , Canada will be a host country for two consecutive years. The following countries postponed their appearances by one year in the future.

Literature prizes (selection)

See also

Secondary literature

Anthologies

  • Canadian contemporary storytellers. Ed. Armin Arnold, Walter E. Riedel. Manesse, Zurich 1967, 1986.
  • Canada. Modern storytellers of the world. Ed. Walter Riedel. Erdmann, Stuttgart 1987.

Web links

Remarks

  1. ↑ U. a. in: Catharine Parr Traills The Backwoods of Canada (1836), Margaret Atwoods Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (1972), Yann Martels Life of Pi (2001).
  2. ↑ U. a. in: Susanna Moodies Life in the Clearings (1853), Sheila Watsons Deep Hollow Creek (1951/1992).
  3. ↑ U. a. in: Stephen Leacocks Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (1912), Alistair MacLeods No Great Mischief (1999).
  4. ↑ U. a. at: Mordecai Richler , Leonard Cohen , Margaret Laurence , Rohinton Mistry , Michael Ondaatje , Wayson Choy , Rita Joe .
  5. ↑ U. a. in: Hugh MacLennan's Two Solitudes (1945), Leonard Cohen's Beautiful Losers (1966), Mordecai Richlers Oh Canada! Oh Quebec! Requiem for a Divided Country (1992).
  6. ↑ U. a. in: Thomas Chandler Haliburton's The Clockmaker (1838).
  7. ↑ U. a. in: Robertson Davies ' Fifth Business (1970), Norman Levines Canada Made Me (1958).
  8. ↑ U. a. in: Anne Héberts Kamouraska (1970), Timothy Findleys Not Wanted on the Voyage (1984).
  9. ↑ U. a. in: Laura Goodman Salversons When Sparrow Falls (1925), Leonard Cohens Beautiful Losers (1966), Nicole Brossards L'Amer ou, Le Chapitre effrite (1977), Jane Rules "Slogans" (in: Inland Passage and Other Stories , 1985) , Farzana Doctors Six Meters of Pavement (2011).
  10. ↑ U. a. in: Thomas McCullochs Letters of Mephibosheth Stepsure (1821-1823), Stephen Leacocks Literary Lapse (1910), Michel Tremblays Les Belles sœurs (1968), Yves Beauchemins Le Matou (1981).

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The concentration on Francophonie / Anglophonie is a relic of Canadian studies, even in the country itself and in other countries, until around 1990. It has been heavily attacked since then, not only because of the First Nations, but also because of the clearly visible immigration other cultures and language backgrounds. Organizationally, the German-speaking scientific community has so far been mostly too cumbersome to react to it. After all, Martin Kuester points out in Canadiana, 12, Verlag Peter Lang, Bern 2013, p. 16, co-ed. is the Austrian Klaus-Dieter Ertler , referring to this completely outdated point of view, which can be visually identified very well on the "Cross of Gaspé ", a huge monument from 1934 to celebrate the first European white immigrants.
  2. ↑ “... it is a novel of Canada. This means that its scene is laid in a nation with two official languages, English and French. It means that some of the characters in the book are presumed to speak only English, others only French while many are bilingual. No single word exists, within Canada itself, to designate with satisfaction to both races a native of the country. When those of the French language use the word Canadien , they nearly always refer to themselves. They know their English-speaking compatriots as les Anglais . English-speaking citizens act on the same principle. They call themselves Canadians; those of the French language French-Canadians. ”,“ Foreword ”, in: Hugh MacLennan, Two Solitudes . Collins, Toronto 1945
  3. ↑ Stan Dragland, "Afterword", in: Leonard Cohen, Beautiful Losers . McClelland & Stewart, Toronto 1991 ISBN 0-7710-9875-8
  4. ^ Eugene Benson and William Toye (Eds.), The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature , Oxford University Press Canada: Don Mills 1997, p. 1085.
  5. ↑ Odette Condemine, Octave Crémazie , in The Canadian Encyclopedia , accessed September 15, 2015 (optionally in French or English)
  6. ^ Chapman, William on Dictionary of Canadian Biography .
  7. ^ "Casgrain, Henri-Raymond" in: Dictionnaire biographique du Canada , accessed on July 27, 2015 (French, English ).
  8. ^ Overview of French-Canadian literature from the 1960s to the beginning of 2013, especially related German-language reviews or overview articles . Canada Center of the University of Innsbruck
  9. ↑ Cornelius Wüllenkemper: Writing as proof of existence on dlf.de, March 20, 2020. Michel Jean, an assimilated Innu, publishes novels and in 2017 published the anthology Amun (German 2020).
  10. ↑ Briefly noted . In: Börsenblatt . No. 28 , 2020, p. 12 .
  11. ↑ Reference: Marburg University Library . The following no. the "maple leaves" have not appeared. The previous editions also contain contributions to Canadian literature.
  12. ↑ not about Canada, but worldwide
  13. ↑ The search engine there often does not work. Google is always effective if you enter Canadian Encyclopedia and then the term you are looking for.