![]() ![]() Obviously, these earnest, serious books are not the only things being written in Canada. But I promise you, the way Ancillary Justice uses language to break down conceptions of gender is just as real and meaningful as the sparse economy of The Vegetarian in revealing the fundamental contradictions in the way society treats women. I hear you all out there, gasping and clutching your pearls. I even think that genre fiction is just as serious and meaningful as “literary” fiction. I don’t think you need Hard Times™ to make a work of fiction that is meaningful and relevant and life-changing. There must be hard times or else how can we know it’s literature?Īnd this, friends, I find deeply boring. But I feel like Canada has its own narrow and particular version of “serious literature”, and if someone is not living some kind of hard-scrabble life in the pages of your novel, you are not going to win the Governor General’s Award or even Canada Reads. I think everywhere in the English-speaking world, “serious” books tend to be favoured with the “serious” term “literature”, and that books written by men or books written about men or both tend to be deemed “serious literature”. ![]() I find the type of literature that receives accolades and awards in Canada to be very earnest and generally in a similar vein. WARNING: Potentially controversial opinion ahead! Are you ready? Are you sure? Okay, here it is then… ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |