Map of the Month: A literary map of Canada (1936)

This month’s featured map is A Literary Map of Canada, a 1936 map held in the Map & Data Library at the University of Toronto Libraries. A digital copy is available through the Map & Data Library’s Scanned Maps Collection.

In 1936, William Arthur Deacon, Canada’s first full-time literary journalist, set out to do something no one had done before: put Canadian literature on the map. Collaborating with illustrator Stanley Turner, Deacon created A Literary Map of Canada — a vibrant, pictorial chart that located Canadian writers and their works across the country’s vast geography. It was more than a charming novelty; it was a powerful statement of literary nationalism.

The idea of mapping literature isn’t new. Scholars and artists have long recognized that the spaces described in literary works — and the authors who created them — shape our understanding of place, just as maps shape our understanding of the world. What made Deacon’s map remarkable was how explicitly it linked geography with cultural identity, as though naming literary works on the physical terrain could solidify a national consciousness through storytelling.

At a time when Canadian literature was still struggling for recognition, Deacon believed that a nation’s soul lived in its stories.Drawn in a style reminiscent of old-world explorers’ charts, Turner’s illustrations populated the map with bears, beavers, schooners, and ships — some real (like theTitanic sinking off Newfoundland in E.J. Pratt’s poem, some symbolic. Authors’ names and their works were pinned to their associated locations: Louis Hémon’s Maria Chapdelaine in Quebec and Frederick Philip Grove’sSettlers of the Marsh in Manitoba. These markers gave Canadian literature a sense of location — and legitimacy.

Yet the map also revealed the limitations of its time. It was largely focused on the southern regions of Canada, leaving the North nearly empty, and included few Indigenous voices beyond Pauline Johnson. Some major works, such as John Richardson’s Wacousta, were omitted entirely. As with any map, Deacon’s was a selective and subjective vision of the literary landscape — one shaped by the cultural politics and canonical tastes of the 1930s.

Still, Deacon’s literary map endures as an evocative artifact — a product of its time and a prompt for ongoing reimagination. Its colorful, curated vision of Canadian letters reminds us of a moment when mapping literature was not only about geography, but about aspiration: a visual manifesto for a national literature still in the making.

Resources

Thomas, C., & Lennox, J. (2019).William Arthur Deacon : A Canadian Literary Life. University of Toronto Press,. https://doi.org/10.3138/9781487575014

Krotz, S. W. (2014). Place and Memory: Rethinking the Literary Map of Canada. English Studies in Canada, 40 (2), 133–154. https://doi.org/10.1353/esc.2014.0012