Preface

One has only to examine in the most cursory way the history and geography of North America to realize how pervasive the concept of a new land has been in the consciousness of its explorers and settlers.The very names of its regions-New France, New England, New York, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, New Albion, New Caledonia-are testimony to this fact, though undoubtedly the second terms in these names also reflect the settlers' unwillingness to surrender completely their Old World heritage and connections.This ambivalence very clearly characterized Canadians and Americans in the early stages of their development, and it is only now, after a couple of hundred years of consolidation, that they have come to the realization that this new land is in fact much more than a mere counterpart of some place in the Old World.Over the years, chroniclers, poets, and novelists in both the United States and Canada have celebrated or examined this theme in a multitude of ways, and for the greater part of this time, the new land was invariably viewed as a kind of paradise.As early at 1666, George Alsop, in his praise of Maryland, exclaims that "each hour speaks to the Inhabitants, in silent acts, that they need not look for any other Terrestrial Paradise...while she is extant."Almost two hundred years later, Susanna Moodie is similarly inspired in her description of Grosse Isle: "Cradled in the arms of the St. Lawrence, and basking in the bright rays of the morning sun, the island and its sister group looked like a second Eden just emerged from the waters of Chaos."And a hundred years later again, Malcolm Lowry, in a description of Canada's west coast, speculated that a house at the edge of the forest was the habitation of "some stalwart Columbian Adam, who had calmly stolen back with his Eve into Paradise."Now, the three writers mentioned above were all exiles from England, and their words thus reflect, at least in part, a conditioned response to the New World.As this present collection of essays demonstrates, not all writers have been so consistently optimistic or celebratory towards the new land, and this diversity reflects such shaping factors as national origins, cultural backgrounds, and the degree of the aesthetic and philosophical sophistication in a given writer's outlook.As the novelist Rudy Wiebe expresses it, "the newness or antiquity of any thing has less to do with the thing itself than with a

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