The Last Forty Years (Volume 2); Canada Since the Union of 1841 - Softcover

Reseña del editor

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1881. Excerpt: ... Chapter XLII. LITERATURE AND JOURNALISM. "It must be admitted that Canada has not yet produced any works which show a marked originality of thought. Some humorous writings, a few good poems, one or two histories, some scientific and constitutional productions, are alone known to a small reading public outside of Canada. Striking originality can hardly be developed to any great extent in a dependency which naturally, and perhaps wisely in some cases, looks for all its traditions and habits of thought to a parent state. It is only with an older condition of society, when men have learned at last to think as well as to act for themselves, to originate rather than to reproduce, that there can be a national literature."--J. G. BodriNOT. The Intellectual Development of the Canadian People, pp. 116, 117. HE pages still left at the writer's disposal are too few in number to admit of his entering into anything like minute or exhaustive details respecting the Canadian literature and journalism of the last forty years. The subject, however, is not a very large one, and may be glanced at in all its bearings, even within the restricted limits that can be assigned to it. It may be premised at the outset that, to speak with absolute precision, Canada has no distinctive literature or journalism of her own. We have a few tolerably good writers, and a very few eminently capable journalists, but in no essential particular can either the one or the other be said to be distinctively Canadian productions. A purely national literature is a commodity requiring age and wealth for its development. Of wealth Canada has little. Of age she has, strictly speaking, none at all, for, in a national sense, she has not yet been born. With the advent of Confederation some faint simulacrum o...