The Maple Leaf as Maple Leaf: Facing the Failure of the Search for Emblems in Canadian Literature

The search for emblems in Canadian literature is no longer completely valid. The desire to find and label similarities and differences has predetermined the findings; for example, Margaret Atwood's Survival presupposes patterns concerning victims, animals, and native peoples in Canadian literature as a whole, and these patterns, arguably, are forced to fit the book's ideological stance. There are similar problems with Philip Stratford's comparative study of French and English literature, All the Polarities. Criticism is becoming increasingly removed from the literature it is ostensibly examining. The pervasive need to subsume each work into the ideological pattern of an invented whole limits our understanding of the work in question. There is a need for a practical overview that has a linear structure but not a thesis