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Female homosociality is critical to the theme of nation-building in Wacousta but, unlike male homosociality, has been almost entirely overlooked in critical treatments of the novel. The novel's ending, for instance, suggests that only the white characters who have indigenized through the agency of cross-cultural female homosociality survive to produce a "Canadian" generation. The challenge of such female-dominated homosocial triangles (for example, Oucanasta-Frederick-Madeline) to male-dominated homosocial triangles (Charles-Everard-Clara) is significant in that it deviates from European literary patterns, replacing the patriarchal structure of old-world society with a community that instead emphasizes strong female and native influences.

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In Fall on Your Knees, Ann-Marie MacDonald writes early twentieth-century Cape Breton and New York through attention to the popular culture of the era, particularly in aspects of the visual, including paintings, photographs, and films. Just as the female characters trangress boundaries between normative and queer sexuality, so too the text offers an aesthetic queering of the boundaries between representational media. The representations of 1920s film star Louise Brooks, particularly, guide readers to a supplemental set of cultural meanings carried by her image and to a recognition that representation, like history, is always partial.

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In her fiction generally, and particularly in the novel Lady Oracle and the story "The Man From Mars," Margaret Atwood explores the gendered body as surface, in the process exploring the implications in capitalist culture of women either having or not having the "right" surface. By building conflict around the conventions that polarize the "right" surfaces against abject surfaces, Atwood recognizes the trap of "sex-citation" and the possibilities of bodies beyond such a binary. Her reading of "attraction" is just that — a reading — variable and unstable, the body as a "sex-citing" text.

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National literary histories, like the Literary History of Canada, generally tend to perform exclusions on the basis of class, gender, race, language, and ethnicity; the only way to correct such past hegemonic exclusions is to assert the cultural legitimacy of specific communities' writings by writing new literary histories. Book history can be important for uncovering texts' transmission and reception histories surrounding the engagement of colonized groups with Western textualities, for its concentration on the institutions that mediate our engagement with literature, and for taking into account the institutions and economic forces involved with canonicity. The newly-established History of the Book in Canada/Histoire du livre et de l'imprimé au Canada project (HbiC/HLIC) has a significant role to play in rethinking Canada's cultural pasts by incorporating work based on identity politics, thereby becoming a truly interdisciplinary and inclusive project.

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Michael Ondaatje's narratological view of history places him in the proximity of postcolonial/postmodern historicism that treats "history" as "text." But while The English Patient offers a postcolonial/postmodern critique of The Histories, Herodotus cannot simply be dismissed; he is literally bound up with the English patient's life. Ondaatje bifurcates Herodotus into main and supplemental arguments, corresponding to imperial and existential histories — a bifurcation that does not exist in The Histories. Such an interpretation is a result of Ondaatje's ongoing reflection on the "text" of Western history in light of its postcolonial/postmodern deconstruction.

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Despite previous critical work that has suggested otherwise, ambivalence in Dionne Brand's Land to Light On does infuse her views on language, identity, nation, and her sense of politics. Brand uses extensive inventories of contemporary and historical exploitations to describe a transnational network of oppressive power both impassive and impregnable, ultimately engaging in a side of identity politics neither its proponents nor its critics emphasize: the construction of the dominant oppressor against whom the recovered subject of oppression struggles. Land to Light On reflects Brand's political ambivalence through the expression of a contradictory political project: the simultaneous construction and subversion of collective identity as a political strategy.

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Poet Raymond Souster looks back over almost seventy years of poetry, discussing his very early development as a poet, his involvement with literary magazines, and his work as an anthologist. He discusses his relationships with Irving Layton and Louis Dudek, their work together, and their attempt to institute a new Canadian poetics. Souster speaks of the critical reception to his work, and argues that philosophy has no place in poetry.