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Canadian Literature

Primary Texts

General information about primary sources.
 
Full text collection of 3000 books and pamphlets documenting Canadian history and literature.
 
Canadian Poetry (Literature Online)
Created in partnership with the Electronic Text Centre at the University of New Brunswick Libraries, this unique collection contains the full text of more than 19,000 poems by 177 poets drawn from over 700 printed sources, many of them rare and inaccessible outside Canada. The collection comprises essentially the complete cannon of English-Language Canadian poetry from the seventeenth century up to the early twentieth
 
Features poetry written by contemporary and 19th-century poets. Also includes author biographies and links to Canadian poetry journals, magazines, and presses.
 
Canadian Poetry: An Electronic Resource (University of Western Ontario)
Scholarly editions of early Canadian long poems, including full-text editions of the work of the Confederation poets. Also includes critical studies of Canadian poetry.
 
Canadian Poetry Archive (Library and Archives Canada)
A searchable database of poems from over 100 early English- and French-language Canadian poets, digitized from the collections of the Library and Archives Canada. Also contains some biographical information.
 
Digitized 19th-century French-Canadian texts in pdf format from the Bibliothèque nationale du Québec.

Special Collections

Botanical illustration and text from "Canadian Wild Flowers" by Catherine Parr Trail

The Edith and Lorne Pierce Collection of Canadiana is the centrepiece of the Queen's University Library.

The collection has resources for Canadian historical and literary studies pre- and post-Confederation. The collection is searable through Omni and is located in the W.D. Jordan Special Collections Library (Douglas Library).