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<2Preface>2
What follows is a retrospective collection of some of my
writings on Canadian culture, mainly literature, extending
over a period of nearly thirty years. It will perhaps be easiest
to introduce them personally, as episodes in a writing career
which has been mainly concerned with world literature and
has addressed an international reading public, and yet has
always been rooted in Canada and has drawn its essential
characteristics from there.
The famous Canadian problem of identity may seem a
rationalized, self-pitying or made-up problem to those who
have never had to meet it, or have never understood that it
was there to be met. But it is with human beings as with
birds: the creative instinct has a great deal to do with the
assertion of territorial rights. The question of identity is
primarily a cultural and imaginative question, and there is
always something vegetable about the imagination, something
sharply limited in range. American writers are, as writ . . .
