Highways of Canadian Literature

Long before Canada had a secure place in the literary imagination of the world, two critics set out to prove it deserved one. Written in the 1920s, this ambitious survey traces Canadian literature in English from the Puritan and Loyalist migrations of 1760 through the emergence of a distinctly Canadian voice in the 1920s. French and Logan argue fiercely for literary nationalism, celebrating the First Renaissance poets like Charles G. D. Roberts and Archibald Lampman who freed Canadian verse from British imitation, and the Second Renaissance writers like Marjorie Pickthall who deepened that emerging tradition. The book illuminates the social and spiritual forces that shaped Canadian letters: the austere faith of early settlers, the trauma and stubbornness of the United Empire Loyalists, the Scots who carried their ballads to Nova Scotia. What gives this work its lasting power is not merely its comprehensiveness but its passionate conviction that Canadian literature mattered, that a young nation could claim a literary heritage worth defending. For readers interested in the birth of Canadian cultural identity, this remains a vital, provocative starting point.