Читать книгу Highways of Canadian Literature онлайн

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The literature produced by the Loyalists in Nova Scotia, on the other hand, was fundamental in the evolution of Canadian Literature. For the most part, the Loyalists were members of the cultured Tory or aristocratic families of New England and the other Atlantic Colonies, and were highly cultured themselves. Many of them were teachers, clergymen, lawyers, jurists and officials—all graduates of Harvard, Yale, and other leading educational institutions in the lost colonies. The Loyalists brought with them their social and cultural ideals; and many of them were practised in literary expression, after the manner of the 18th century prose and verse. They were thus fitted by education and powers of literary expression to reconstruct, as they did, the civilization and culture of Nova Scotia, and to produce, as they did, the first Nativistic Literature of Canada. How they accomplished these creative results is an instructive study by itself.

During the American Revolution the Loyalists were aristocratic families with an ardent British sentiment. They wished to retain British connection and to promote their own institutions, with New World modifications, modelled upon British institutions. The persecutions they endured during the whole of the Revolutionary times and their forced exile to Nova Scotia did but intensify their sentiment for British connection in their new home in Nova Scotia. Yet the love for their old homeland remained, and became with them a rather poignant nostalgia. It was, however, the old homeland they loved; but for the people of the United States they had no sentiment save scorn and hate.