The Cambridge History of Canadian Literature. Ed. Coral Ann Howells and Eva-Marie Kröller

The years 2003 to 2009 saw the publication of no fewer than five literary histories of Canada, a level of activity perhaps unseen in the field since the Canadian Renaissance of the 1960s and, indeed, an unmistakable sign of the “establishment of Canadian literature as an important scholarly field”: the second edition of New’s A History of Canadian Literature (2003); the Kanadische Literaturgeschichte (ed. Groß, Klooß, Nischik, 2005; in German); Biron/Dumont/Nardout-Lafarge’s Histoire de la littérature québécoise (2007; in French); the History of Literature in Canada (ed. Nischik, 2008; rather a new project than, as Howells and Kröller incorrectly claim in their introduction, a “revised translation” of the 2005 German Geschichte); and in 2009 The Cambridge History of Canadian Literature. Edited by Coral Ann Howells and Eva-Marie Kröller, and authored by 32 international scholars, the Cambridge History focuses – as do the histories by New, Nischik, and Groß, Klooß, Nischik – on Canadian literature in English and in French. Comparing Canadian literature to a “multi-plot novel” rather than a “double-stranded narrative,” the editors seek to “highlight major connections and differences between the two linguistic traditions.”