Canadian? For at least two hundred years, Canadians have been obsessed with who they are. My use of "obsessed" is meant to draw attention to the extensive examination – particularly by inhabitants
of Quebec and Ontario – of Canadian identity since the early nineteenth century. Over the last two hundred years, this obsession has been worked out in part in the visual realm, particularly in the arts.
Many readers are familiar with the Group of Seven, Northrop Frye,
and Margaret Atwood, whose art and literature painted, theorized,
and narrated stories of Canadian identity in the twentieth century. In
Visibly Canadian, I focus principally on the representational practices
of the citizenry in the nineteenth century; specifically, how visual culture participates at a fundamental level in the formation and articulation of a complex discourse about citizenry, propriety, and collective
identities. I argue that visual culture is the primary mode through
which social identities are produced and consumed in the nineteenth-century Canadas.