Mimic Fires

In this survey and analysis of long poems written about Canada between 1690 and 1900, D.M.R. Bentley establishes literary contexts for a greatly neglected period of Canadian literature. He also provides critical discussions of the poems, addresses larger questions of tradition and intertextuality, and demonstrates the existence of a continuity in Canadian writing from the colonial to the post-colonial period. Bentley includes 18 long poems by writers with first-hand experience of Canada, including Henry Kelsey, Thomas Cary, John Strachan, Thomas Moore, Oliver Goldsmith, John Richardson, Joseph Howe, William Kirby, Isabella Valancy Crawford, and Archibald Lampman. His commentaries offer a wealth of vital information on each poem, such as its place in the Canadian tradition, its prose sources, incidents and people from whom the poet drew inspiration, and structural and stylistic analysis. "Mimic Fires" provides a historical overview, a retrospective conclusion, and an extensive bibliography, and is informed throughout by ecopoetic, feminist, new historicist, and post-colonial theories. By improving our understanding of 19th-century Canadian writing, "Mimic Fires" in turn affects how we view writing in Canada in this century.