The Northern Imagination

A Study of Northern Canadian Literature

Allison Mitcham
Illustrations by Carl Schaefer

6 X 9 inches, 104 pages
10 b&w illustrations

WHAT MAKES CANADA DISTINCTIVE AND ORIGINAL? The Northern Imagination examines a number of northern Canadian concerns, principally through French and English novelists who have focussed on the northern wilderness in the belief that it is the chief factor informing the national psyche. For novelists with styles and attitudes as diverse as Gabrielle Roy's and Margaret Atwood's, Claude Jasmin's and Harold Horwood's, Henry Kreisel's and Yves Thériault's, the northern wilderness has become a dominant Canadian myth. Indeed, the North—a new utopia, as many seem to see it—stands out in much twentieth century Canadian fiction as perhaps the only place left, not only in Canada but in all the Western world, where one can pursue a personal dream, where one can yet hope to be an individual.

Allison Mitcham

Author

Carl Schaefer

(1903-1995)

Illustrator

Carl Schaefer was a distinguished Canadian painter and graphic artist. He studied first under members of the Group of Seven and exhibited with them, and he was a founding member of the Canadian Group of Painters, which succeeded the Group of Seven after its dissolution. He exhibited widely in Canada, the United States, Great Britain and Europe, receiving a long list of honours.

He is probably best known for his paintings, in water colour and oil, of the country around Hanover, Ontario, where he was born and grew up, his water colours of Waterloo County and the Haliburton Highlands, and paintings and drawings of the country north of Toronto, painted and drawn since the War. His drawings and paintings of aircraft, personnel and aerodromes, which he did as War Records Artist with the Royal Canadian Air Force during the Second World War, now held by the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa, are an important part of his work, and deserve recognition as such.

Northern Mythos Artshow ...

Hanover Drawings Artshow ...