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this was the second part of Vincent Massey’s vision. “The Massey Report politicized the subsidy of the arts. Its central argument was that the nation should support the arts so that the arts could support the nation.” 48 The report triggered a number of events, including the creation of the Canada Council and the National Library. It also fostered the creation, recognition, and publication of works focusing on Canada and the creation of a national identity. It was in the post-Massey Report era that the critical work of NorthropFrye, Margaret Atwood, and D.G. Jones found an immediately receptive audience. 49 Arguably, until 1990 the institutionalization of Canadian literature and the direction of publishing were shaped by the initiatives launched by the Massey Report. As Robert Lecker notes, the emerging Canadian canon, with relatively few exceptions, privileged works that represented the realities of Canada - its landscape, people, and search for its own identity. Books that failed to follow this formula tended to slip off the course lists, particularly off McClelland and Stewart’s influential and inexpensive list of Canadian books in the New Canadian Library (NCL) series.
    Young’s comments on the need for Canadians to recognize and nurture their own literature anticipated those of Margaret Atwood in her watershed book of criticism,
Survival
. In that 1970 publication, Atwood introduced Canadian audiences to their own literature and literary tradition and, as the book’s title implied, focused her attention on the emerging theme of the individual’s survival in the face of obstacles. From Atwood’s
Survival
, as well as Northrop Frye’s
The Bush Garden
and D. G. Jones’
Butterfly on Rock
, Canadians began to get a sense of their literature as not only deeply rooted in the great scripts of western civilization, particularly of the Old Testament, but also as bearing witness to the socio-cultural shifts of the day.
    As Canadian literature gained recognition, the works being taught in university classrooms tended to be those mentioned in the critical trilogy (Frye, Atwood, and Jones) and had a doubled perspective - one eye on history and the deep structures of myth, the other on the contemporary moment. Sinclair Ross’s novel
As For Me and My House
, for example, was intended to capture the dustbowl depression era as well as explore the individual’s relationship to God captured by the closing phrase of the title’s originating context, “as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord.” 50
    Other works appearing on course syllabi in the early decades of the institutionalization of Canadian literature included novels by Morley Callaghan, whose archetypal characters walkedthe streets of twentieth-century Canada; Robertson Davies, whose Deptford trilogy evoked Jungian archetypes and also depicted Ontario in the twentieth century; Margaret Atwood, whose novel
Surfacing
Opened with a road trip that served both to introduce its readers to an archetypal quest story and also to remind them of the particular landmarks of a highway leading to northern Quebec; and Hugh MacLennan, whose works captured socio-political events of the twentieth century in generalized patterns of binary opposition and dialectic while also portraying Canadians, with their admirable tendency towards moderation, as a valuable paradigm for diplomacy. This Canadian literary canon or shortlist of works of significant cultural currency emerged for practical as well as for intellectual reasons. Drawing on a questionnaire distributed to Canadian writers and academics, three shortlists of works to be included in the NCL list were announced, to heated controversy it must be said, at the now infamous 1978 Calgary conference: “the most ‘important’ 100 works of fiction” (List A); the ten most important novels (List B); and the ten most important works of various genres (List C). 51 Of the