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Canadian Literature's SILVER JUBILEE 219 possessed of considerable literary sophistication but virtually no familiarity with Canadian literature. This reader could do no better thanbuy - and read - Stouck's volume. Nor will the Canadian reader more versed in the country's literature be shortchanged by that some transaction. Stouck's discussions regularly define the essential quality of a specific work or writer and often, as with his assessment of Ross's As For Me and My House, constitute criticism of the first order, far above the requirements of a general introduction. Canadian Literature's Silver Jubilee w.J. KEITH Canadian Literature, no. 100 (Spring 1984). 376. $15.00 With its hundredth issue, Canadian Literature has just celebrated its twenty-fifth birthday. Its first appearance in 1959 was welcomed by many but subjected to gloomy forebodings from others. As Henry Kreisel notes in his movingaccount of an immigrant's frustrating attempts to explore the literature of his new country, 'in 1961, the late Douglas Grant, then editor of the University ofToronto Quarterly, asked me how long Ithought Canadian Literaturecould keep going. He thought the material for articles would soon run out.' Grant, ofcourse, was only one of many. From our present viewpoint the question seems to sum up all that was condescending , self-defeating, 'colonial.' Certainly it betrays a lack of confidence yet, while happily unfounded, such doubts were by no means unreasonable. So far as literature in English is concerned, we must think back to a time before Margaret Atwood, Jack Hodgins, Hugh Hood, Robert Kroetsch, Margaret Laurence , Dennis Lee, Alice Munro, Michael Ondaatje, and Rudy Wiebe. Othars like Margaret Avison, Leonard Cohen, Mavis Gallant, John Glassco, Ralph Gustafson , D.G. Jones, Eli Mandel, Alden Nowlan, AI Purdy, Mordecai Richeler, and Phyllis Webb had begun to publish but had yet to produce their most characteristic work. Ernest Buckler and W.O. Mitchell had each published one novel; Robertson Davies was known as a witty playwright and author of amusing satiricalfiction, buthis major novels were still to come;James Reaney was a young' poet who had not yet turned to the stage. Even established"figures like Birney, Callaghan, Dudek, Layton, Livesay, MacLennan, Ross, Scott, and Souster were still in mid-career, their ultimate importance not yet wholly evident. Moreover, much of the existing material was out of print, and critics who were writing intelligently on the subject could be counted on the fingers of one hand. " Literature in French was in some respects a little more advanced, but Quebec was still in its long sleep of quiet isolation (1959 also saw the death of Maurice Duplessis, the end - as it turned out - of a historical and cultural era). We must think now of a French-Canadian literature before Hubert Aquin, Marie-Claire Blais, Roch Carrier, Rejean Ducharme, Antonine Maillet, and Michel Tremblay (to name only a few). Others, like Gerard Bessette, Michele Lalonde, and UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 54, NUMBER 2, WINTER 1984/85 220 W.J. KEITH Gaston Miron, had not yet come to prominence; Jacques Godbout and Anne Hebert, already known as poe~s, had published no novels. Canadian Literature, though never quite as comprehensive in its treatment of Quebecois writing, has nevertheless done much to bridge the two solitude-cultures. (Only eighty of the ninety-six contributors to the hundredth issue write in French; a pity, but one doesn't know how many were invited, how many failed - or declined - to produce.) To found a journal entirely devoted to Canadian literature in 1959 clearly entailed an act offaith verging on foolhardiness. Fortunately, however, Canadian Literature' made its bow in what might be called an annus mirabilis. 1959 saw the publication of La Belle bete, The Watch That Ends the Night, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, and The Double Hook, while Layton catapulted into poetic prominence with A Red Carpet for the Sun. Two years earlier, the Canada Council had been established to encourage the arts, and in 1958 the launching of the New Canadian Librarybegan the slow process of making important literary texts readily available. These and other factors combined to assist in the nurturing of the literature that we enjoy today, and a significant part of...

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