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Canadian Literature on the Internet Part I Introduction
Of the many web sites which are wholly or partly devoted to Canadian literature, suprisingly few are of any value to the end user. All too often the sites one finds are dominated by lengthy lists of links to other web sites, which in turn are also dominated by similar lists: connectedness with no content. Similarly hollow are the numerous fan sites which present a favourite poem or story or image, often with the ubiquitous set of links. One wonders if permissions have been obtained. Margaret Atwood has been a particular target of this type of site. Yet another barely helpful group of sites are are those one could call "promo" sites. They have been set up by print magazines with the sole purpose of convincing visitors to subscribe to the paper version of the publication. Some give away a little content as a teaser, but few show much of real use. Search engines are less than helpful. They cannot discriminate among sites with respect to quality of content. Typing a writer's name into a search engine such as Lycos will return thousands of hits. There is no card catalogue to the web. The web, however, is not a complete wasteland. It does contain some valuable and rewarding sites that can assist you in the study of Canadian literature. My purpose here is to offer some useful tips about what resources are available to students, scholars, and general readers of Canadian literature, with a special emphasis on Canadian poetry. I have divided the most useful Canadian literature sites into the following categories. The first four will be dealt with in this issue of It's Still Winter and the remainder in the next issue. I must warn you that the categories are imperfect and overlap. The web is constantly changing. It is likely that some of the sites I have found wanting will have changed radically for the better since I last visited them. Other deserving sites will have sprung up that I have failed to notice. Such is the nature of the web, which could have been more aptly named the worldwide maze. |
