Afterword

Summary

As recent fiction has been pointing out, Canada is a multicultural, multinational, and multiracial country which resists any simple or simplified definition. From its early stages, when the country was a colony paying service to far-off mother countries, it grew slowly into its own land, a growth mirrored in Canada’s maturing fiction. When early writers charted their ways into the landscape, they often looked abroad for their sources. Then they looked to their own country’s writers for further sources. From the mid-twentieth-century’s flinging off that colonial mentality, writers came to realize they were building on their own traditions and espousing their own understandings of the country and its inhabitants. With the emergence of Indigenous voices, then of naturalized Canadian authors, writers became an essential segment in a distinctive society. Canada now boasts of a multicultural group of writers unafraid of the country or of one another; they are not frightened of choosing their own settings, their own landscapes. They write as they want – on subjects they have the freedom to choose.