The Routledge Introduction to Victorian Canadian Literature

This study is a comprehensive overview of the literature produced in Canada during the reign of Queen Victoria (1837–1901). Whereas previous examinations of this fertile literary period have been discussed in the context of larger, more abstract terms like "early Canadian literature" and "19th century Canadian literature," this book offers a more narrowly focused examination of the kinds of literary shifts and transformations that occurred as British North America pivoted from its colonial beginnings to its new Confederation (and post-Confederation) reality. Focusing on the four main genres – non-fiction, drama, poetry, and prose fiction – this book draws together a rich corpus of notable works in order to illustrate the hybrid nature of the period’s literature. It also seeks to demonstrate the many ways in which Victorian-Canadian writers engaged in trans-Atlantic and transnational literary experimentation.

Thomas Hodd received his Ph.D. in English from the University of Ottawa (2006), with a specialization in Canadian studies. He has taught at l’Université de Moncton since 2010 and has published important essays on Victorian-Canadian writers such as Charles G.D. Roberts, Bliss Carman, and William Kirby, and on cultural movements of the period like spiritualism, theosophy, and the Fredericton School of Confederation writers. He is co-editor of a special issue on early Canadian literature for Canadian Literature (2012) as well as editor of a critical edition of Flora Macdonald Denison’s late Victorian-Canadian novel Mary Melville: the Psychic (2019). He is editor-in-chief of the forthcoming four-volume Routledge reference series Canadian Literature in the Long Nineteenth Century.