Literature of Canada

Canadian literature (widely abbreviated as CanLit) is literature originating from Canada. Canadian writers have produced a variety of genres. Influences on Canadian writers are broad, both geographically and historically.

Before European contact and the Confederation of Canada, Indigenous peoples in North America have occupied the land and have maintained a rich and diverse history of culture, identity, language, art and literature. "Indigenous literature" is a problematic term, as every cultural group has its own distinct oral tradition, language, and cultural practices. Therefore, Indigenous literatures in Canada is a more inclusive term for understanding the variety of languages and traditions across communities.

After the colonization of Canada, the dominant European cultures were originally English, French, and Gaelic. After Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau's "Announcement of Implementation of Policy of Multiculturalism within Bilingual Framework," in 1971, Canadian critics and academics gradually began to recognize that there existed a more diverse population of readers and writers. The country's literature has been strongly influenced by international immigration, particularly in recent decades. Since the 1980s Canada's ethnic and cultural diversity have been openly reflected in its literature, with many of its most prominent writers focusing on ethnic minority identity, duality and cultural differences. However, Canadians have been less willing to acknowledge the diverse languages of Canada, besides English and French.

In 1802, the Lower Canada legislative library was founded, being one of the first in Occident, the first in the Canadas. For comparison, the library of the British House of Commons was founded sixteen years later. It should be noted the library had some rare titles about geography, natural science and letters. All books it contained were moved to the Canadian parliament in Montreal when the two Canadas, lower and upper, were united. On April 25, 1849, a dramatic event occurred: the Canadian parliament was burned by furious people along with thousands of French Canadian books and a few hundred of English books. This is why some people still affirm today, falsely, that from the early settlements until the 1820s, Quebec had virtually no literature. Though historians, journalists, and learned priests published, overall the total output that remain from this period and that had been kept out of the burned parliament is small.

It was the rise of Quebec patriotism and the 1837 Lower Canada Rebellion, in addition to a modern system of primary school education, which led to the rise of French-Canadian fiction. L'influence d'un livre by Philippe-Ignace-Francois Aubert de Gaspé is widely regarded as the first French-Canadian novel. The genres which first became popular were the rural novel and the historical novel. French authors were influential, especially authors like Balzac.

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