SOURCE: Sugars, Cynthia. “Noble Canadians, Ugly Americans: Anti-Americanism and the Canadian Ideal in British Readings of Canadian Literature.” American Review of Canadian Studies 29, no. 1 (spring 1999): 93-118.

In the following essay, Sugars studies popular British and other Western literary and critical perceptions of Canadian literature, writing that while many of these studies view Canadian culture as a welcome postcolonial refuge in opposition to American culture, the same cultures have some level of complicity in American imperialist enterprises.

For some years now Canadian literature has been generating immense attention on the international stage. This has been no less true in Great Britain, the erstwhile imperial center, where Canada has been the long-time subject of British fascination. While in the early decades of this century Canadian literature was considered the inferior production of a cultural backwater, from the late 1960s onwards Canadian culture has garnered intense notoriety in Britain. The institutional...