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Canadian criticism has too easily accepted the official description of a Canadian literature which expresses "survival in a garrison," with its attendant sociological and autobiographical connotations, thus failing in its primary task: to mediate between writer and reader. Northrop Frye's 1965 assertion that Canadian literature remains overly tied to its social and historical setting appears to be celebrated by writers such as D. G. Jones, Margaret Atwood, and John Moss, whose critical studies treat works of Canadian literature as repositories of indigenous themes and images documenting localized historical, psycho-social, mythological and political concerns, thus ignoring the importance of developing a Canadian tradition of comparative, formal criticism. Canadian literature can achieve its full potential only if a trained audience is developed with the critical awareness both to demand the highest accomplishment of its writers and to appreciate the accomplishment when it occurs.

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In Margaret Atwood's seven books of poetry between 1961 and 1974, Double Persephone, The Circle Game, The Animals in That Country, The Journals of Susanna Moodie, Procedures for Underground, Power Politics, and You Are Happy, the opposition between the static, the mythological or the sculptural, and the kinetic, the actual or the temporal, has been a central concern. Atwood opposes the aesthetics of space to those of time, with the dynamics of time often overwhelming those of space. The struggle of her historical personae to abandon art and enter historical time is enlarged, by the extra-temporal aesthetic implicit in her use of language and form, into her own personal struggle. Thus, Atwood's poems circle back on themselves, recreating one central drama of artist-woman engaged in an unsuccessful struggle to escape art for mortality. Essential to this drama is the implicit impossibility of resolution, embodied in "the gorgon touch" through which Atwood's language, form, structure, and characterization are directed.

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A comparison of Robertson Davies's character Dunny Ramsay, of Fifth Business, with the protagonist of Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn exposes the divide between different generational viewpoints and demonstrates the complementarity of the two works. Each novel delineates an emerging North American society struggling to realize its genuine individuality while encumbered with the trappings of another time and space. Through the use of the Homeric concept of the voyage or quest, the narrators reflect this struggle through their transformation into fugitives whose initial lack of direction becomes focussed by their flight. These manifestations of North American social order, one seen through the eyes of innocence and the other through the eyes of experience, reveal the limitations of these polarized points of view while giving the reader insight into the worlds they present.

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Michael Ondaatje's The Collected Works of Billy the Kid is a montage of techniques designed to catch and record the process of recollection. Machines – guns, camera, and pencil – are shown to fragment and isolate single impressions out of the movement of life. The transformation of nature to machine is linked through metaphor to the theme of madness, while metaphors drawn from the still photo and motion picture demonstrate the disintegration of living things. This collection counterpoints fixity with movement as the rhythms of the poetry and the composition of its pages flash forward and back in patterns that focus on the operations of perception and memory, exploring the process of recording both history and legend from a multiplicity of perspectives.

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To understand Hugh Hood's work it is necessary to understand his Catholicism, not only as it pertains to his views of morality, but also as it affects his system of aesthetics, as this results in an art which offers a complete, coherent and systematic way of looking at the universe. This aesthetic system is made clear in Hood's essays "The Ontology of Super-Realism," and "The Absolute Infant." In these, he explores the idea that the perceptive agent of immaterial reality is the imagination, a position further developed in his short story "The Village Inside." Through its utilization of contemporary landscape as relic, this story opens the past to the present and demonstrates Hood's understanding of the coherence of the universe through exposing the coherence of time.

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The search for distinctively Canadian myth is found in five Canadian history plays: Charles Mair's Tecumseh (1886), Robertson Davies's At My Heart's Core (1950), John Coulter's Riel (1962) and The Trial of Louis Riel (1967), and James Reaney's Sticks and Stones (1973). This myth is discovered both through reference to and use of Old World tradition as well as through resistance to American values. The heroes of these plays are not traditional national champions but defeated visionaries and defenders of lost causes. To the extent that it is possible to discern a "Canadian myth" in these plays, that myth might be described in part as a search, through their heroes, for a workable synthesis of authority and liberty, intellect and intuition, self-assertion and sacrifice.

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Farley Mowat's People of the Deer and Never Cry Wolf, both part of a vigorous Canadian tradition of nature writing and exploration literature, express in a vivid and forceful way preoccupations central to the Canadian imagination. Rather than focussing on his own personal adventures, Mowat concentrates on understanding the land, people, and animals. He has evolved towards a deliberately literary presentation of his subject, seeking not to impose his own preconceived values on the new modes of existence he encounters. In Mowat's hands, the North becomes a Canadian version of the pastoral dream -- an alternative model of society commenting on the urban world -- allowing a deeper understanding of this world and its shortcomings.

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George Grant's Lament for a Nation, like Steven Leacock's "Old Farm in a New Frame," and Susanna Moodie's Roughing it in the Bush, understands the past as a mythical creation to which it is impossible to return. In his essays in Technology and Empire, Grant celebrates the tough asceticism of pioneer North America, while declaring the need to discover the universal through the particular. In Lament, he finds the particular in the personage of John Diefenbaker, who, in his allegiance to the British empire, becomes the incarnation of what had been beautiful and good in Canada and Britain, and the rallying point from which the reader must resist the further absorption of Canada by the modern or American condition. Through Grant's consideration and rejection of opposing arguments, he manages to persuasively suggest a more profound conservatism that transcends the temporal and polemical realm of Canadian nationalism.

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Visual poetry, deriving from such sources as the Greek Anthology, and Renaissance poets such as George Herbert and Robert Herrick, is further developed in the first half of the twentieth century by writers such as Stephan Mallarme and e. e. cummings. Earle Birney, Bill Bissett, and bpNichol can be identified as the nurturers and propagators of a Canadian tradition of concrete poetry. Deceptively simple, the meanings of these poems are developed through typography, shape and word-play. Their hidden complexity reveals an innovative yet historically rooted art form which has grown vigorously and thus deserves further consideration.

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Scott Symons's Place d'Armes uses the journal to create an open-ended novel whose form reflects an immediacy of experience. Symons's fictional character, Hugh Anderson, writes a journal in order to inspire material for his own novel, thus allowing for private notation within the public art of the novel. The various literary forms within this book – notes, journal, letters, novel – further comment on one another through their juxtaposition, illustrating Robert Kroetsch's thesis that Canadian writers are engrossed in "unhiding the hidden." The journal comes to overtake that of the novel, representing a move back to simplicity and directness, maintaining a link with the past which gives strength to the present.

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The two landscapes of Marie Claire Blais's Une Saison dans la Vie d'Emmanuel, the outer landscape of the Quebec winter, and the inner, imaginative one shared by her characters, interact and combine in a diabolical vision of human existence that recalls the poetry of Arthur Rimbaud. Through the use of a fragmentary style of narration with its shifting points of view, through grotesque characterization, and above all, through the confusion of time and space, the characters' lives are isolated and distorted even as they express the human condition. Rimbaud's "Une Saison en Enfer," with its descent into hell and corresponding glimpses of heaven, elucidates this novel's demonstration of the interdependence of life and death, pleasure and pain, and the corresponding cycle of unfulfilled renewal.

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The first person narrator of Richard Wright's The Weekend Man, Wes Wakeham, not only allows the reader to observe his private thoughts, but also gives the reader a sense that this narrator is consciously trying to communicate with the reader. Unlike Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy who, as a self-conscious artist, sets out to write a novel about his life and opinions, Wakeham attempts to establish a relationship with the reader on the basis of his ordinary, daily experience. Albert Camus's narrator Meursault, from The Stranger (L'Etranger), embodies a similar ordinariness, which illuminates the irony present in Wright's novel. Despite moments of contradiction and irony which might inspire distance from the narrator, Wakeham, through his powerful and seductive narration, succeeds in convincing the reader to participate in and identify with his point of view.

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Margaret Laurence may be called a Jungian, in the sense that some of Jung's most penetrating intuitions are exemplified and illuminated in her four Manawaka novels: The Stone Angel, A Jest of God, The Fire-Dwellers, and The Diviners. While the earlier female characters represent aspects of Jung's concept of personality, Morag Gunn, the protagonist of The Diviners, goes through a series of developments that corresponds closely to Jung's full process of individuation. Although Laurence's fiction demonstrates the scope and articulation of a complete cultural myth that lends itself to Jungian analysis, it also moves beyond Jung's ideas on male-female relations. The woman novelist ultimately diverges into a significantly different psychological and cultural mythos of woman, one in which the integrated but isolated self must learn to be its own support and create its own finality.