“That makes it all the worse. If it were fiction I wouldn’t care.”

Fiction and history before Confederation

Although the events of history are always at the mercy of the historian, some moments seem to be worthy of greater investment than others. In the cultural history of Canada, the decades of 1760 and 1830 are clearly seminal. The first marks the end of the French zone of influence in North America as an extension of French rule. This is also the period when, in the course of early settlement, various visions of what came to be called British North America were put forth. While the country was to acquire such a name, the name masked a continual competition between the changing perspectives toward First Nations, on the one hand, and anglophone and francophone Canada, on the other. It was also the decade in which the printing press arrived in the former French colony. 1830 stood for the decade in which the argument, particularly between anglophone and francophone Canada, took on a more violent character and led to a series of decisions and compromises that issued in the Act of Confederation. It marks, then, the second major prise de conscience of the changed colony when, among other things, the efforts toward creating national literatures began to bear serious fruit.