Chapter 10 - Canadian Fiction in the Twenty-First Century

Summary

There is no simple distinction in Canadian fiction between the late twentieth and the early twenty-first century. Many authors, for example, Margaret Atwood and Dionne Brand, Elizabeth Hay and Wayne Johnston, Thomas King and Rohinton Mistry, Lisa Moore and Alice Munro, Michael Ondaatje and M.G. Vassanji, are publishing important fiction as they did in the twentieth century. What distinguishes the periods is the still increasing diversity of writers who find a natural home in their adopted land, “extending the bounds of literary appreciation,” as Vassanji states. The naturalized writers work alongside but frequently not in tandem with more traditional Indigenous and native-born writers, all of them contributing to the multicultural and multiracial worlds of contemporary Canadian fiction. In the development of Canadian fiction, writers are writing of the past, the present, and the future; they are writing of lands far away as well as nearby; they are writing what they need to write in terms that appeal to them. A pattern established in the seventh chapter now leads to a similar way of regarding nineteen writers who have emerged in the twenty-first century as commanding and distinctive fiction authors.