What Makes Something Canadian Literature?

“Academics have been scrambling to find some kind of official criterion for inclusion in this canon since at least the 1950s – Is it a literature that is made here, or set here, or addresses uniquely Canadian themes? – and they have always been curiously hidebound about it, always trying to find ways to restrict membership in this club rather than to open it up.”

Louis D. Rubin Jr., 89, Founder Of Algonquin Books

“He wrote three novels himself, which drew on his own upbringing as a Jew in the South … But in a life of prolific production – he wrote or edited more than 30 books – his greatest contribution was as a cultural historian and critic who became … ‘perhaps the person most responsible for the emergence of Southern literature as a field of scholarly inquiry’.”