ACCORDING TO NORTHROP FRYE, English-Canadian literature is marked by a five-century-long oscillation between the romantic tendency, on the one hand, moving in the direction of myth and metaphor and their formulaic units, and the realistic tradition, on the other hand, moving in the opposite direction, displacing or adjusting such improbable formulas so as to produce verisimilitude (Frye 1976, 36–37). English-Canadian cultural production can thus be situated at opposite extremes. In the period between 1918 and 1967, a large part is grounded in the themes and motifs of the folktale, in the structures of the mythopoeic or marvelous, and in the implausible, erotic, and often violent world of romance. Simultaneously, a large part of cultural production, derivative of a society fascinated by history as well as by social observation, has long been anchored in documentary or expository material for which English-Canadian film, poetry, life writing, and historical and historiographical fiction are well known.

Among the best-known writers resorting to mythical and romantic formulas, and claiming entitlement to the freedom to “lie” — that is, to make full use of the imaginative faculty — is the American Nathaniel Hawthorne. In the introductory chapter to The Scarlet Letter: A Romance (1850), entitled “The Custom-house,” Hawthorne provided the framework for an artistic manifesto on the prerogatives of the “romance writer” to create a “neutral territory, somewhere between the real world and fairyland, where the Actual and the Imaginary may meet, and each imbue itself with the nature of the other” (66).