Socialism and the English Canadian literary tradition

An important but suppressed feature of our literary history is the remarkab le number of writers who have identified themselves publicly with socialist politics or ideologies that range from parliamentary social democracy to r evolutionary communism. This article documents the socialist affiliations o f many major and minor writers, among them canonical figures such as Lampma n, Grove, F.R. Scott, Birney, Livesay, Laurence, Wiseman, Klein, Webb, Layt on, Gallant, Acorn, Richler, Atwood, Ryga, and Fennario. This tradition is historically contextualized with reference to the social gospel movement, t he influence of the "Old Left" on modernist poetry of the 1930s and 1940s, and the impact of the "New Left" on the establishment of indigenous profess ional theatre in the 1960s and 1970s.