Butterfly on Rock: Study of Themes and Images in Canadian Literature

In this volume Douglas Jones considers some of the themes and visages that have taken root in Canadian poetry and fiction during the past three generations. The persistent concern of widely different authors with these similar themes and images suggests that the individual writers share a common cultural predicament. It may also suggest that they participate in and help to articulate a larger imaginative world, a supreme fiction of the kind, that embodies the dream and nightmares of a people, shapes their imaginative vision, dreams and nightmares of a people, shapes their imaginative vision of the world, and defines, as it evolves, their cultural identity. This study makes it clear that the cultural predicament proposing different writers to take up the same themes is not defined simply by a literary tradition, but by the actual experience of many Canadians. This fresh and unconventional discussion, based on the author's wide knowledge of the original works, makes Canadian literature (primarily that written in English) intelligible in terms of its imaginative patters and inner concerns. The approach is cultural and psychological rather than pureply aesthetic or literary. The book is not primarily a survey, nor does it attempt to deal fully with any single author or work. Rather, by isolating certain themes and images it defines more clearly some of the features that recur in the mind, the mirror of our imaginative life.

DOUGLAS G. JONES, a poet in his own right, is author of Frost on the Sun, The Sun is Axeman, and Phrases from Orpheus. He was the editor of Ellipse: Œuvres en traduction/Writers in Translation, and has been a member of the Arts and Advisory Panel of the Canada Council. He was a former Chairman of the Department of English at the Université de Sherbrooke, Quebec.