Canada

Abstract

In early 1968, despite the flag-waving celebrations of Canada’s centennial as a self-governing dominion in the preceding year, the panel of judges responsible for the Governor-General’s Awards for Literature deemed no novel worthy of the prize for English-Canadian fiction published in 1967. The refusal to make the award can be seen as symptomatic of the paradoxes of Canadian cultural nationalism in its firm check on literary patriotism, and the decision must have been particularly disappointing to Hugh MacLennan who for more than a quarter-century had been honoured as Canada’s ‘national novelist’. MacLennan’s The Return of the Sphinx (1967), like his later Voices in Time (1980), received limited attention from critics in the period after the centennial as they hurried to construct canons for the university study of Canadian fiction by defining a national literary tradition based on genealogical or geographical models. Writers such as MacLennan, Sinclair Ross, Ernest Buckler, Morley Callaghan and W.O. Mitchell were honoured for showing Canadians ‘where is here’ (Frye II 338) in the thirties, forties and fifties, but they were firmly bracketed within the decades in which their early work appeared.