Canadian literature may be more difficult to discuss than most because of Canada's unique geographical and historical situation. It is a country larger and younger than most, is peopled with a widely diverse array of races, religions, and backgrounds, and is generally committed to multiculturalism. Therefore, just as one piece of the Canadian social puzzle has often been, "is there a Canadian identity?," one recurrently important piece of the Canadian literature puzzle has been the question, "Is there a Canadian literature at all?" This has been an ongoing point of debate since the mid-1800s, and is still being discussed in literary circles today. For example, a quick Internet search for university syllabi on Canadian literature courses will offer an overwhelming majority of professors who still discuss whether or not "Canadian" literature exists. For instance, one postmodern Can. lit. course offered as recently as 2002 at the College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia, includes this in the course syllabus: "The course starts off with a brief consideration of the 'problem' of Canadian identity: Is there such a thing? If so, what is it? And does that identity manifest itself in a national literature that is distinctly different from, say, British or U.S. literature? These are the sort of questions that get raised in Kroetsch's essays and Atwood's Surfacing." In fact, it has frequently been suggested that the question, "what is a Canadian?" is entangled very intricately with the question "what is Canadian literature?" in a way that does not happen, to so great an extent, with other literatures. Leon Surette writes, "a disproportionate amount of commentary on Canadian writing has been cultural history (or prophecy) rather than truly literary commentary." At the end of the debates, the verdict almost always returned is that there is a literature and an "identity" distinctly Canadian. However, because of its size and breadth, Canadian literature is often broken into subcategories.
There are at least three ways that, traditionally, critics and scholars have chosen to deal with the geographic size and cultural breadth of Canadian literature. The most common, by far, is to divide it by region or province.
There are anthologies of "Eastern Canadian literature" or "Prairie literature," for example. Another way has been to divide it by categorising the authors. For instance, the literature of Canadian women, Acadians, aboriginal Canadians, and Irish-Canadians have been anthologized as bodies of work. A third way has been to divide it by literary period, such as "Canadian post moderns" or "Canadian Poets Between the Wars."
