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How did travel journals and letters shape the documentary tradition in Canadian literature?
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Canadian literature
Canadian writer Alice Munro was lauded as a âmaster of the contemporary short storyâ by the Swedish Academy when it awarded her the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2013.
Travel journals, diaries, and letters written by early explorers, travelers, and settlers serve as the foundational documents of the documentary tradition in Canadian literature. These accounts, which recorded impressions of the land and its inhabitants, established a literary preoccupation with geography, history, and the arduous nature of exploration as a means of seeking personal and national identity.1
This tradition evolved as writers used these "metaphoric mappings" to address the fundamental Canadian question, "Where is here?" The documentary mode has since become a central pillar of Canadian writing, influencing various genres:1
- Historical Metafiction: Authors like Timothy Findley and Rudy Wiebe have utilized letters, clippings, and historical records to reconstruct past events and explore the tension between history and truth.2
- Documentary Poetry: The "serial long poem" often functions as a documentary mode, where poets like Daphne Marlatt and George Bowering revisit historical personae and specific locales to investigate the past.3
- Life Writing: Modern memoirs, biographies, and autobiographies continue to resonate with this tradition by documenting individual trajectories and cultural histories.2