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Canada in the 19205 has been traditionally regarded as the desert outpost of modernism. At best, its writers were able to filter modernist experimentation from elsewhere through Canadian landscapes, and to create "a partly isolated culture of patterns and tendencies which exist [ed] in a more complicated form outside" (Dudek n). At worst, they were content "To paint the native maple" (R R. Scott) and enumerate old themes, seemingly miles away from metropolitan and cosmopolitan literary trends. If "Canadian literature evolved directly from Victorian into Postmodern" (Kroetsch i), it appears that this feat was achieved through the nation's own desire to remain a noncombatant in the struggle between artistic movements. In this sense, Canada remained a neutral zone in the war over modernism: a space of hesitation and vacillation, a land of transience and escape from social and cultural upheaval.
Luckily, this version of the Canadian canon has had its critics, who have asserted the diversity of poetry and fiction written in Canada in the first half of the twentieth century. But it seems that we are only just beginning to address the interpenetration of modernism and the experience of urban modernity, even in texts that are widely acknowledged as dealing with modern city life. For other national literatures, the connection between modernity and urbanity has been at the centre of modernist studies for years. Works by writers such as James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, R Scott Fitzgerald, and Nella Larsen have led to readings of the modern metropolis as a microcosm of the modern world, reflecting its "futility and anarchy" (Eliot 177), or alternatively, its empowering challenges to "totalizing or hegemonic" discourses (Boone 7). In these texts, "the city is not only... a form of modern life; it is the physical embodiment of a decisive modern consciousness" that is expressed through modernist literature (Williams 239). Urbanization and industrialization are narratives that manifest themselves differently depending on cultural contexts, but the experience of the modern city has been a profound and inextricable element in modernist literature-and this is true not only in Britain and the United States, but in Canada as well.
The effect of the metropolis on Canadian writing has, of course, been recognized. Though Mary Jean Green points to the reluctance of the early...