That seems hard to believe, but it might be true. This post is a exploration of that question, using Canadian Literature as a case in point.
When I began my career in academic book publishing in the mid 1970s, almost every university English Department in Canada offered a Canadian literature survey course. Many offered a two-part survey, with one course devoted to Canadian literature prior to the 1950s, one to the post-1950s explosion of Canadian literature. And many of those survey courses kept adding sections to meet student demand. These were the heady days following the publication of Northrop Frye’s The Bush Garden in 1971 and Margaret Atwood’s Survival in 1972. There was, in Frye’s words, an “unquenchable desire among the Canadian cultural public to identify itself through its literature.” Everyone was interested in discussing whether Canadian literature had, in Atwood’s words, “a distinct tradition and shape of its own.” Whereas, in 1948, only 10 Canadian universities had offered even a one-semester course in Canadian literature, by 1972 38 Canadian universities offered at least 90 Canadian literature courses (by the count of the Canadian Encyclopedia). And enrollments were expanding everywhere.
In the 1990s, though, interest in identifying a “distinct tradition and shape” to Canadian literature began to wane. English departments began to loosen requirements of all sorts, and fewer and fewer departments required English majors to take a Canadian literature survey—or indeed a Canadian literature course of any kind. Nowadays, courses that survey the full history of Canadian literature aren’t even offered at most Canadian universities. A decline in the number of Canadian literature courses, however, does not necessarily mean fewer English literature students studying Canadian books. In the other direction, the number of books by Canadian authors that are assigned as texts in courses with no connection to nationality has significantly increased in this century. By 2020 works by Canadian authors such as André Alexis, Esi Edugyan, Yann Martel, Miriam Toews (and Atwood, of course) had become staples both in Introduction to Literature courses and in a variety of upper-year themed courses—Environmental Literature, Children’s Literature, Science Fiction and Speculative Fiction, Gender and Sexuality in Literature, and so on.
It’s interesting, though, that many of the Canadian works that have been widely taught in these courses (e.g., Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Martels’ The Life of Pi, Esi Edugyan’s Half-Blood Blues and Washington Black, Miriam Toews’ Women Talking, Madeleine Thien’s Do Not Say We Have Nothing) are largely or entirely set outside Canada, while others (Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, Emma Donoghue’s Room, Souvankham Thammavongsa’s How to Pronounce Knife and Pick a Colour) feature a setting that is never identified. It’s become commonplace for a majority of the books taught in an introductory or themed course in literature to be incidentally Canadian—written by a Canadian, but having little or nothing Canadian about their subject matter. Such was the case in the list of course texts for a Speculative Fiction class that I spoke with at one point last year. I was surprised both by how few texts were assigned in the course (evidence of the “crisis in reading” that’s become an issue at every university) and by the fact that two of the three novels being taught—Atwood’s The Year of the Flood and my own Animals—were Canadian (though neither references anything Canadian specifically).
In the subject matter of our literature as well as in the diverse backgrounds of Canadian authors, then, we have come a very long way from the days in which the Canadianness of Canadian literature found clear expression in Robertson Davies’ Deptford, High Garner’s Cabbagetown, Margaret Laurence’s Manawaka, Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Avonlea, Farley Mowat’s “barrens,” Alice Munro’s Huron County, Mordecai Richler’s St. Urbain Street, Tomson Highway’s Wasaychigan—and the Ontario backwoods of Susanna Moodie’s Roughing It in the Bush and Atwood’s The Journals of Susanna Moodie. With a few striking exceptions (André Alexis’s Fifteen Dogs, Michael Crummey’s The Innocents, and David Chariandy’s novels of Scarborough come immediately to mind), prominent Canadian literary works of the past generation tend not to draw attention to places that are recognizably Canadian.
And we seem to have moved beyond asking what (if anything) is distinctively Canadian about Canadian literature—just as Americans long ago moved beyond asking what was distinctively American about American literature.
But Americans didn’t stop studying the development of their literature when it became extraordinarily diverse and wide-ranging—any more than Britons have ever stopped studying the historical development of British literature. Should we in Canada be giving up, as we appear to have been doing this century, on studying Canadian literature as Canadian literature?
In asking that question, we should also ask if the trend towards offering fewer and fewer courses that focus specifically on Canadian literature is in fact still continuing. Might things have been starting to move in the other direction, in an “elbows up” Canada determined to define itself in opposition to Donald Trump’s America? In the 18 months since Trump launched his “51st state” offensive, might there have been a significant uptick in Canadians’ interest in their literary history, as expressed in the number of students enrolled in Canadian literature courses?
I started to wonder just that a year or so ago—not by coincidence, just as we at Broadview Press were about to publish the first volume of a new edition of Laura Moss and Cynthia Sugars’ superb anthology, Canadian Literatures in English. It struck me that it might be fairly easy to obtain a rough measure of whether or not such a change were occurring: simply ask Canadian literature instructors, and/or heads of English departments across Canada whether enrollment levels in Canadian literature courses have been increasing over the past couple of years.
During the past few weeks I’ve finally done just that, emailing more than two dozen academics in Canadian English departments. Fourteen have responded. Several of them have cautioned that raw enrollment numbers are a very rough measure indeed of levels of student interest—that the frequency with which particular courses are offered may change, that Canadian literature specialists may go on sabbatical, and so on. In any particular year, then, changes in enrollment for a particular course may not reflect any underlying trend. Several also cautioned that changes in enrollment for Canadian literature courses can often be driven by changes in departmental requirements; if a department chooses to make a Canadian literature survey course mandatory for English majors (or, in the other direction, to drop such a requirement), the resulting changes in enrollment will be a reflection of changes in perceptions among faculty as to the importance of studying Canadian literature, not a reflection of changes in student attitudes.
Clearly, there are many caveats. Nevertheless, the results of this informal survey are quite striking. The responses I received were from universities across Canada. Three of the respondents reported that the circumstances at their institution made it impossible to identify any pattern of changes in enrollment. Seven of the respondents reported that enrollments in Canadian literature courses had been stable over the past couple of years. And four of the respondents reported that there had been a noticeable decline over that period in the enrollment numbers for Canadian literature courses. Not a single respondent reported that there had been any significant increase in enrollment in these courses since Trump’s assault on Canada and our “elbows up” response took shape in early 2025. A couple of respondents volunteered the information that at their institution it was courses in American literature that had been generating increased interest.
This little survey has been small and unscientific, so it’s certainly possible that it’s inaccurate. It’s also quite possible that these results do not point to any broader pattern—that Canadians might have less interest in enrolling in Canadian literature courses but more interest in, for example, taking courses in Canadian history. Perhaps other cultural indicators may suggest that Canadians’ level of engagement in Canadian culture has been on the increase since Trump’s assault on Canada began. But it seems at least possible that a marked increase in anti-Trump and anti-American feeling has not been accompanied by any broader cultural shift—that Canadians are no more interested in exploring who we are and where we have come from than Canadians were before Trump declared his intention to make Canada the 51st state.
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