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Canadian Literature for the People

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Canadian Literature for the People
Canadian literature is but a small part of the literature that is in bookstores across the globe. Students in Ontario, Canada should study Canadian literature because students need to focus on their own Canadian culture despite being surrounded by other cultures, it is also important to promote and establish a foundation for writers across Canada in order to encourage young writers.

Students across Ontario take English as a compulsory course during their high school career. It is important that they learn about Canada’s authors and not just the old authors that our culture has adopted from France and Great Britain. Canada is a “branch plant” of France and Britain this means that our culture hasn’t had the opportunity to develop since it has always been influenced a more powerful foreign culture. Often Canadian literature is found to be quite old, for example in many cases grade 12 students will have to study Mordecai Richler’s Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz or Margaret Laurence’s Stone Angel. Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid Tale, the most recent of these books was published in 1985; nearly 30 years ago.

Canadian authors are generally white; this is not a very good reflection of Canada’s multiculturalism.
“ Canada is not going to have a national literature in the mode of those European lands where a long history has bound the people together, and we are homogeneous racial inheritance has given them a language, customs, and even a national dress of their own”(Davis 1979).

Canadians need to look at the work of Canadian authors who have come here from different backgrounds. Canadians should connect with their multiculturalism is very important , Canadian residents are lost in a sea of international influences, it is hard to truly have a single identity. “What is a Canadian? A Canadian fellow wearing English tweeds, a Hong Kong shirt and Spanish shoes, who sips Brazilian coffee sweetened with Philippine sugar from a Bavarian cup while nibbling

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