Montreal was the literary centre of Canada in the 1940s, a hotbed of literary activity in both English and French crowned by the international success of Hugh MacLennan's Two Solitudes and Gabrielle Roy's The Tin Flute. With the rise of nationalism in both English Canada and Quebec, Toronto emerged as the literary centre of English Canada, with Montreal the literary centre of Quebec. In literary terms, Canada and Quebec became two different countries, with two different languages and two different literatures. English Montreal went into decline and its once-great writers were marginalized. Writing in the Time of Nationalism: A Montreal Life is an insider's story of the writers who have been caught between these rival nationalisms. Herself a writer, Linda Leith was a leading figure in the creation of the Quebec Writers' Federation, and she is founder of Blue Metropolis Foundation. The story she tells is the story of a literary community that went missing from the map of Canada for a generation, and that has reemerged over the past ten years in a renaissance that has garnered international attention.

Linda Leith was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland. One of the most international of Canadian writers, she has lived in London, Basel, Brussels, Paris, Ottawa, Budapest and Montreal, where she founded the hugely successful Blue Metropolis Montreal International Literary Festival. She has a Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of London, England, and is the author of seven books, including the literary memoirs Writing in the Time of Nationalism and Marrying Hungary, as well as three critically well-received novels, Birds of Passage, The Tragedy Queen, and The Desert Lake, all published by Signature Editions. She has also been published by Vehicule Press and ECW Press, as well as XYZ Editeur and Lemeac (in French), and Rad (in Serbian).

Linda Leith's profile page

“Writing in the Time of Nationalism: From Two Solitudes to Blue Metropolis provides an important personalized historical account of the politics and institutions that have informed the production and dissemination of Montreal English-language fiction from the mid 1960s to the present. Linda Leith’s teleological history begins even earlier, though, with a brief account of the “glory days” or “golden age” of English Quebec fiction in the 1950s—when Hugh MacLennan, Mordecai Richler and Mavis Gallant emerged as internationally recognized authors. The story then moves into its telling of “the decline from the glorious past to the inglorious present” during the decades of the Quiet Revolution (1960s), the rise of the Parti Québécois (1970s) and subsequent referendums on sovereignty (1980 and 1995). It goes on to describe the energetic and entrepreneurial activities of Anglo-Quebec writers like herself to develop an institutional infrastructure that has enabled, in Leith’s opinion, an “Anglo Literary Revival,” the seeds of which “were sown with the creation of Blue Metropolis Foundation in 1997 and then of the Quebec Writers’ Federation in 1998.” Leith tells the story with the same frank optimism and good-natured pluck that has characterized her work as a writer, scholar, teacher and literary organizer from the moment she returned to Montreal to teach at an English CEGEP (Collège d’enseignement général et professionnel) in 1975. Leith’s narrative of her personal experience in Quebec begins when her family moved to Pointe-Claire Village, about 15 kilometres west of downtown Montreal, in 1963. She was 13 years old and had already lived in Northern Ireland (where she was born), London and Basel. These early memories of her arrival in Quebec describe an encounter with a traditional French Canadian village—“there were nuns on the streets”—that would soon be radically transformed by the major political initiatives of Jean Lesage’s Liberal Party of Quebec. That transformation included the nationalization of Hydro-Québec (in 1963, under the guidance of then Liberal Hydraulic Resources minister René Lévesque), the establishment of a Quebec Pension Plan (1966) and the secularization of education, including the replacement of classical colleges with CEGEPs (1967). And this is how much of Leith’s narrative proceeds, alternating between personal (but never very personal) observations and more generic accounts of the political events and changes that were going on around her. It is a sound procedure, and readers will learn much about the social and political history of post-war Quebec by reading this book. The real point, however, lies in how Leith makes connections between these personal and general political histories and the history of Anglo-Quebec literature. Montreal in the second regime of Maurice Duplessis (1944–59), a period since known as “la Grande noirceur” (the Great Darkness) for its corruption and for the repressive “authority of both the Catholic Church and Anglophone-controlled business,” is also the period that coincides with Leith’s above-mentioned “golden age” of English Quebec fiction. These “good old bad old days” were so nourishing to English-language writers, Leith suggests, not only because of the bohemian atmosphere that characterized Montreal at this time, but also because of the “often distant” relations between the French and English and the unproblematic self-identification of Montreal’s English-language writers “as Canadians.” With the death of Duplessis in 1959, the start of the Quiet Revolution in Quebec initiating change that “was overdue” and the subsequent articulation of new forms of Québécois and Canadian national identity came the impossibility for Anglo-Quebeckers of any simple mode of national self-definition. Here we are moving toward one primary thesis of Leith’s book, which states that the contending nationalist projects of Canada and Quebec arising in the 1960s and ’70s alienated, isolated and essentially exiled the English-language writers of Quebec: “The assertion of rival national identities called for clear boundaries, and writers working in English in Montreal were a complication that neither side was in any hurry to claim. We had become writers without a country.” As we follow along, a series of pervading binaries—Quebec versus Canadian nationalism, Toronto versus Montreal as dominant centres of English Canadian and French Québécois literature, Michel Tremblay versus Margaret Atwood as representatives of two distinct national literary identities—come to inform the logic of Leith’s narrative. While these binaries certainly oversimplify the complexities that Leith is genuinely interested in discussing, it is clear how they help push forward her narrative about Blue Metropolis and the recent Anglo Literary Revival. Leith poured herself into the work of developing the Blue Metropolis Festival in order to “promote the work of English-language writers” from Quebec in a manner “that would allow us to rub shoulders with international writers” and “to invent a new kind of literary festival for Montreal … that would cross the linguistic divide.” These two themes—international promotion and internal rapprochement—inform her understanding of what she has accomplished as a festival organizer and direct the connections she makes between national politics and local, organizational politics.”

—Jason Camlot, Literary Review of Canada