Checking the mainstream: The architecture of Canadian literary criticism

"Checking the Mainstream: The Architectonics of Canadian Literary Criticism" surveys criticism of Canadian literature. This study discusses the historical development of criticism by identifying formal models and tracing their origins and permutations. The premise of this study is that forms of criticism impart ideological attitudes--attitudes towards national unity, multiculturalism, and authority, for example--that are not always acknowledged by the critic. Indeed, this study points out many critical works where the form is at odds with the expressed content.;There are three chapters, each chronicling a stage in the development of the criticism of Canadian literature. In the first chapter, covering the century from Confederation to Centennial, critical forms are shown predominantly to serve a nation-building impetus. Towards the end of this period we see the beginnings of a revisionist undercurrent. In the second chapter, covering the decade of the 1970s, mainstream criticism is concerned with national identity and the thematic drive to define "Canadian" issues, although the revisionist stream is becoming more prominent. In the third chapter, on the l980s and 1990s, we see more disjunctive and comparative forms; this occurs as issues of difference and the politics of identity become central, and as critics become more self-conscious of expressions of authority. This is a change precipitated by the critical introspection and self-consciousness generated in the 1970s by Margaret Atwood's watershed text, Survival.;The development traced in "Checking the Mainstream" is of a mainstream criticism. Accordingly, this study focuses on the canon, broadening slightly in the last chapter to cover the enormous volume of increasingly specialized critical texts. Since the act of determining which tests constitute the canon is itself an ideological act, "Checking the Mainstream" is from the start an explicitly self-conscious study. Aware of the selectivity and the rhetoric involved in its own representation, "Checking the Mainstream" unfolds the story of Canadian literary criticism coming into its own, in a manner approaching the fictionalized narrative of a literary romance.