[In the following review, Lernout praises the essays in Gaining Ground.]

As the title of this book indicates, Canadian literature is slowly becoming recognized in Europe. But one of the editors, Reingard Nischik, warns against a too facile optimism. In her article on the history of European interest in CanLit, Nischik quite rightly points out that Canadians seem to lack a clear picture of what is really going on in Europe. In less than 30 pages she gives an account of the CanLit scene in 18 European countries and adds an admirably complete bibliography of European studies on Canadian Literature.

What emerges first in the article is that there has been European interest in Canada for only the past 10 years. This is hardly surprising. Ten years ago, when I was a sophomore in Antwerp, I was told that because America does not have a history it cannot have a literature. The people in power—European universities used to be a lot less democratic than North-American ones—stuck to Shakespeare, Milton and (maybe) a few romantics. Modern British literature is written by civilized Englishmen (preferably Oxbridge graduates) about civilized Englishmen. Usually only one person, a specialist in Shakespeare’s minor contemporaries who speaks an almost obsolete English, decides what will be taught, on what his students will write their dissertations and who will get the tenure-track jobs. It does not pay to specialize in Canadian literature, especially not if you’re interested in both Canadian literatures. That this situation is slowly changing is a result of the decentralization of the '70s, which saw the emergence of new and experimental universities and effective cultural policies on the part of Canadian embassies.

The critical essays in this volume testify to the seriousness of European critics. All of these essays could have been published in the best Canadian journals; they are all very well researched, take into account the latest criticism and show an acute awareness of critical theory that is sometimes lacking in similar Canadian work. Simone Vauthier’s essay on The Wars refers to Genette’s work on narratology. Pierre Spriet’s to Ruwet, Riffaterre and Chatman and there is even an essay by one of the foremost European narratologists, Franz K. Stanzel.

Only two essays discuss Québecois writers, an emphasis that partly reflects the marginal situation of minor francophone literatures in Europe but is surely aggravated by the fact that the vast majority of these critics comes from Austria, Switzerland and Germany. Another striking emphasis in this volume is the result of the relative novelty of CanLit in Europe: all but three essays discuss works of writers who are still active today and more than half deal with post-modern novels. There could be various reasons for this. Maybe the post-modernists travel to Europe more often (the idea for the book came to Kroetsch and Nischik over a Kölsch in the shadow of the Cologne cathedral); maybe Walter Pache is right when he states in his essay that whereas Canadian modernists anticipated a national identity by defining national themes, Canadian postmodernists “adopt themes freely from international sources and adapt them to domestic uses.” Today, the creative act itself becomes a productive force in the creation of a national identity. If this were true, Europeans would be more interested in the “domestic use” of international themes than in Canadian themes. I don’t think we are; the attraction of Kroetsch’s prairie novels, of Hodgins’s Vancouver Island stories and of Rudy Wiebe’s work lies in the themes and in the settings, in the wildness and wonder of people and landscape.

In the most interesting essay in this collection, Eva-Marie Kröller writes a fascinating account of 19th-century Canadians visiting the Rhine valley. This is not just literary criticism, it is much more: Kröller moves from comparisons between the Drachenfels and Cape Diamond to Canadian reactions to the Franco-Prussian war, the influence of the Nazarene concept of art on Québecois frescoes and finally to the ironic treatment of German romanticism in Gallant’s The Peignitz Junction, Laurence’s The Stone Angel and Paul Hiebert’s Sarah Binks.

What I missed in Gaining Ground is a discussion of works by and about Canada’s immigrants, who are of course also emigrants from somewhere. Such a project could not be confined to high literary texts; it would have to include “pulp,” oral tales, diaries and travel literature, not necessarily in English or French. German, Portuguese, Dutch and Italian stories of emigration are as much a part of the Canadian heritage as West-Indian, Chinese and Japanese ones. It is here that European critics could make a worthwhile contribution. But this is merely an idea for a second volume, not a critique of this excellent collection of essays.