This remark by Ella Soper and Nicholas Bradley in their‘Introduction’ to Greening the 'Maple': Canadian Ecocriticism in Context (2015) definitely sets a ground to explore the 'context' that was there in Canadian literature long before the advent of ecocriticism and discuss both the continuities and ruptures in Canadian studies that reveal "nature" to be a seminal yet shifting and unstable concept and site of investigation.
Ecology, the relation between individuals and the physical environment also encompasses a deep sense of belonging to a society, a land, a culture and community, being indispensable to one's existence. In the early 1970s Canadian cultural nationalism positioned wilderness as mark of difference as well as an object of ecological…show more content… Canada has a distinct environment, with dimensions both in time and space, that is, in both history and geography, it does possess certain unique qualities. The most distinguishing one about the land is that there is so much of it; secondly to one's surprise its emptiness - which renders the country as largely unknown to rest of the world, even to most Canadians. The third fact is its rugged, character - forming climate solely determined by its geographical location. The nuances of ecocriticism or ecology namely, 'nature', 'wilderness' and 'environment' and their cognates powerfully illumine the way Canada has been a country with a specific environment and a specific kind of historical…show more content… Frye is of the view that virtually from the inception of the notion of a Canadian National literature; nature has occupied a central place in critical conversation. Atwood, in her workSurvival echoes the same idea about the apparent distinctiveness of Canada in the form of ‘CanadianSurvivalism’. In this sense, Canadian literary studies, with their long-standing interest in nature, wilderness, and landscape might be said to have always been