Where Has "Real" Nature Gone, Anyway?: Ecocriticism, Canadian Writing and the Lures of the Virtual

Abstract

This essay offers an approach to ecocriticism in the context of contemporary English Canadian literature and culture. It analyzes definitions of the national identity in the past three decades in connection with Canada’s real and/or imaginary wilderness. Following a period of dismantlement of such associations, a period characterized by the rise of a fundamentally urban multiculturalism in Canadian literature, the ascent of ecocriticism in the 1990s might be interpreted as a conservative move towards the recuperation of the unified national metaphor the country’s association with the wilderness seemed to provide. But, is there anything Canadian about ecocriticism? What could Canadian writers and critics contribute to it? To answer these questions, the essay will scrutinize various moments of the metaphor in criticism and fiction, along with changing concepts, in the age of technology, of nature and of our relation to it.