Abstract
Seventeen years ago Margaret Laurence expressed her novelist’s credo this way:
It [Literature] must be planted firmly in some soil. Even works of non-realism make use of spiritual landscapes which have been at least partially inherited by the writer. Despite some current fashions to the contrary, the main concern of the writer remains that of somehow creating the individual on the printed page, of catching the tones and accents of human speech, of setting down the conflicts of people who are as real to him as himself. If he does this well, and as truthfully as he can, his writing may sometimes reach out beyond any national boundary.1
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Notes
Margaret Laurence, Long Drums and Cannons (London: Macmillan, 1968) p. 10.
David Stouck, Major Canadian Authors (Lincoln, Neb.: University of Nebraska Press, 1984) p. 241.
Gwendolyn Davies, ‘A Literary Study of Selected Periodicals from Maritime Canada’, York University, PhD dissertation, 1979, unpublished.
Michèle Lacombe, ‘Frying Pans and Deadlier Weapons: the Immigrant Novels of Mary Anne Sadleir’, Essays in Canadian Writing, no. 29 (Summer 1984), pp. 96–116.
Gaile McGregor, The Wacousta Syndrome: Explorations in the Canadian Landsape (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985).
Ronald Sutherland, Second Image: Comparative Studies in Quebec/Canadian Literature (Toronto: New Press, 1971) Ch. I.
Nellie McClung, In Times Like These, Social History of Canada Series, introduction by Veronica Strong Boag (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972) p. 97.
Elspeth Cameron, Hugh MacLennan: A Writer’s Life (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981) p. 229.
Sidney Wise, ‘Liberal Consensus or Ideological Battleground: Some Reflections on the Hartz Thesis’, Historical Papers, Canadian Historical Association, 1974, pp. 1–14.
Carl Berger, Sense of Power (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1970) p. 99.
Suzanne Howe, Novels of Empire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1949) pp. 82ff.
See also ‘The Town — Our Tribe’, Ch. 9 in Clara Thomas, The Manawaka World of Margaret Laurence (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1975);
Clara Thomas, ‘Social Mythologies in Sara Jeannette Duncan’s The Imperialist’, Journal of Canadian Studies, vol. 12, no. 2 (1977) pp. 38–49.
See also Clara Thomas, ‘Women Writers and the New Land’, in The New Land: Studies in a Literary Theme, ed. by R. Chadbourne and H. Dahlie (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1978), pp. 45–59.
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© 1990 Clara Thomas
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Thomas, C. (1990). ‘Planted firmly in some soil’. In: Nicholson, C. (eds) Critical Approaches to the Fiction of Margaret Laurence. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-10092-7_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-10092-7_1
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