Conclusion

Abstract

J.G. Bourinot, in his Our Intellectual Strength and Weakness,said in 1893: “there is one respect in which Canadians have never won any marked success, and that is in the novel or romance” (27). This, of course, may be a valid statement in the context of traditional, aesthetics/“high brow” oriented literary criticism. From a socio-literary point of view, literature ought not be studied by measuring the value of a literary text by standards derived from canonical texts only. Rather, it ought to be studied by paying attention to a “whole”, i.e., a system of literature. This does not mean that all literary texts included in systemic literary studies will become canonical texts; the systemic study of literature entails value differentiation, too. But such an approach specifically requires the study of non-canonical literature. Thus, in the terra incognita of nineteenth-century comparative Canadian literature a minor type of text, the preface, becomes the object of literary study. The preceding study has attempted the discovery and analysis of the nineteenth-century English-Canadian and French-Canadian novel preface. The study was based on a body of prefaces which, at least in the case of the English-Canadian novels, has not, until now, been compiled or studied. The study of the prefaces was based on the theory and methodology of the systemic and empirical approach to literature, ETL.