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Samuel Hearne, in his 1770 journal, resolves critical ideological, social, political, and economic "disruptions" by mapping culture onto geography. Hearne reconciles certain apparently incommensurable "disruptions of his cultural knowledge" by means of what Daniel Clayton calls "the physical and rhetorical demarcation of distance and difference between Europeans and Natives." The HBC's Prince of Wales's Fort functions as the symbolic, if absent, centre of Hearne's text, and the text's crucial symbolic classifications depend fundamentally on a shifting spatial value called "distance from the Fort."

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C.C. Vyvyan's travel book Arctic Adventure (1961) marks a transition from centuries of Arctic discovery and exploration narratives. Vyvyan manipulates her traveling and writing personae in a genre that has historically been masculine, and she resists the imperial baggage that traditionally accompanies travel writing. In this movement between the roles of heroic explorer and curious observer, Vyvyan exemplifies T.D. MacLulich's categorization of emplotment in Canadian exploration narratives.

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In more than a superficial sense, the narrator of F.P Grove's "Snow", in Over Prairie Trails (1922), talks his way through space and time. Language is the landscape being traversed, and it is the telling, not just the teller, that cannot quite be believed. Grove shapes his narrative according to conventional formulae that draw the reader into accepting a sense of "documentary" transparency. Close reading of the text underscores the artifice and reconfirms that the narrative arc enacts a condition of perception rather than recording a set of empirical observations. The rhetorical trope relates adventure and land ownership with masculinity and social status, which engages readers in the same set of social assumptions and desires that Grove was obliquely expressing.

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Daphne Marlatt's publication of three previously published travel writings together in Ghost Works foregrounds the different spaces the narrator moves through and the problem of home and place in these texts. As the word "home" echoes and re-echoes throughout Ghost Works, it picks up layers of meaning complicating the narrator's view of her self, her family, her mother, her nation, and her past. Biddy Martin and Chandra Talpade Mohanty's "Feminist Politics: What's Home Got to Do with It?" informs the discussion of both the power and appeal of home and its connections with exclusions and repressions.

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An examination of literary site pieces written in Canada during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by Charles Sangster, Thomas D'Arcy McGee, Catherine Parr Traill, Sir Charles G. D. Roberts, Bliss Carman, and Archibald Lampman reveals a persistent yearning on the part of Canadian writers to connect themselves with their landscapes and with the British literary tradition, particularly with the second generation of Romantic poets - Shelley, Keats, and Thomas Moore. The naturalization of a Romantic poet in Canadian space is a creative and connective act that bridges the temporal and geographical gaps between the Old and the New World and, in so doing, offers cultural memory as a source of inspiration and hope for a troubled present and uncertain future.

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Par les allusions historiques et l'intertexualité, les auteurs québécois de récits de voyages du XIXe siècle créent un espace familier, accessible et lisible. Maniant l'ellipse, la citation et le rapprochement temporel et topographique, ces auteurs expriment leur admiration muette, font appel aux descriptions des autres, et utilisent l'époque et la terre connues comme unités de mesure à l'évaluation de l'espace visité. Dans les œuvres typiques de l'abbé Jean-Baptiste Proulx, d'Adolphe-Basile Routhier (qui conjure l'antiquité romaine), de Napoléon Bourassa et de l'abbé Henri-Raymond Casgrain (dont le Pèlerinage au pays d'Évangéline invoque le poème de Longfellow), l'espace réel est assimilé par le voyage dans le temps et le voyage dans les livres. Les référents historiques et livresques agissent comme synecdoques, marquant une filiation humaniste, artistique et biblique pour permettre à l'auteur, et donc au lecteur, d'atteindre l'espace géographique inconnu.

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Souvent qualifiée de romantique, catégorie historiographique importée d'Europe d'Amérique, la littérature canadienne-française du XIXe siècle ne démontre que faiblement le trope typiquement romantique de l'émerveillement devant la nature. L'intérêt des poètes canadiens-français pour la mer, notamment dans l'œuvre d'Octave Crémazie, révèle un espace négatif incarnant à la fois la nostalgie de l'exilé séparé de sa patrie par la mer et l'angoisse du peuple canadien-français dont le territoire incertain est une île métaphorique à laquelle il s'accroche, risquant à tout moment d'être englouti par les flots britanniques. Jusqu'au début de la Seconde Guerre mondiale, ce nœud chronotropique marin s'est substitué en topos du terroir, image d'un Québec agricole et catholique qui se métamorphose ensuite jusqu'à ce que l'eau reprenne, de nos jours, une altérité positive.

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Through a reading of Henri Lefebvre's The Production of Space and spatial theorist Edward Soja's Postmodern Geographies, Canadian literary regionalists such as Edward McCourt and Henry Kreisel are shown to have been trapped unnecessarily between two opposing conceptions of regional space. Those operating within the illusion of opacity tend to overemphasize the materiality of space, holding that space's "natural simplicity" speaks for itself. By contrast, those who subscribe to the illusion of transparency tend to view space as an invisible, unproblematic phenomenon "given action free reign." False polarity stunts the ability to theorize literary regions as spaces that are capable of representing simultaneously the social differences that exist inevitably within regional spaces and the complex particularities that issue from a condition of geographic co-presence.

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The American philosopher Charles Peirce created a taxonomy of signs based on the triadic distinction between symbol, icon and index. The icon is a literary and specially narratological manifestation in Sharon Butala's short story "The Prize" from her collection Fever. Three groups of icons emerge in Butala's work: those of transience and discontinuity, those of space and distance, and those of genius loci, the "genius of place." The icon is also a broad cultural symbol in Western Canadian and Canadian literature by such authors as Margaret Laurence, Robert Kroetsch, and Rudy Wiebe.

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Le titre nominal de Kamouraska d'Anne Hébert signale la piste référentielle du roman, désignant à la fois un espace réel et l'ambiguïté de ce qui se déroule dans cette œuvre de fiction. Comme l'affirme Roland Barthes, « le Nom propre s'offre à une exploration, à un déchiffrement »; lire Kamouraka comme une carte géographique révèle une multitude de noms, correspondant à la réalité des auberges, des rues de Québec et de Sorel et des villages le long du parcours de George Nelson. Investis de sens complexes sémantiques, syntaxiques et poétiques, ces mots sont plus grands que de simples références de lieux. Presque tous ces toponymes surgissent du songe de madame Rolland, alias Élisabeth d'Aulnières, et donc de la métadiégèse, devenant plus que des signifiants de lieu accablés de l'espoir ou de l'anxiété d'Élisabeth.

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L'espace romanesque de Victor-Lévy Beaulieu est paradoxalement à la fois nationaliste et universel, opposant la littérature « désincarnée » québécoise à l'usage incorporant de façon intertextuel, voire iconographique, des œuvres de Herman Melville, Jacques Ferron, Jack Kerouac, Fennimore Cooper, Leo Tolstoï et l'historien Jean-Baptiste-Antoine Ferland. Dans Oh Miami Miami Miami (1973), Beaulieu récuse l'espace canadien pour ne retenir que sa déroute, figurée par la pendaison de Louis Riel. S'opposant à ce qu'il considère la petitesse et la médiocrité de ses contemporains québécois, Beaulieu fait du paysage gaspésien de Blanche forcée (1976) un espace national aux dimensions littéraires et oniriques élargies. En marge de ce qu'il considère un « faux pays », Beaulieu cherche plutôt à incarner la démesure, reconstruisant l'espace national quelque part entre un univers littéraire et historique sans frontières et un régionalisme enraciné et authentique.

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Morley Callaghan's Strange Fugitive (1928), Canada's first urban novel, is a refiguration of the discourses that defined Toronto as an urban space. Narrative tension results in an ambiguous model of the city as Callaghan interlaces realist literary modes of crime and corruption with the domestic and secure place of "Toronto the good." The inevitably ambiguous depictions of Toronto that arise out of this coupling call attention to the representational strategies that modernist writers used to construct visions of the modern city and bring it under conceptual control.

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Under the Volcano was substantially rewritten numerous times, rejected by publishers in a variety of forms, but found its final shape while Malcolm Lowry and his wife lived in a squatter's shack on the shore of Burrard Inlet in Vancouver. The longer Lowry lived there, the more complex his fictional ruminations on the landscape became. The landscape was for Lowry, to use the words of American historian Simon Schama, "a text on which he wrote his "recurring obsessons." The shores of Burrard Inlet can still be explored to recover the myth and memory that lie beneath the surface of the place.

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Hugh Hood's Around the Mountain is a response to a specific sociohistorical circumstance: the development of a new and boundless urbanism, one which escapes the power of vision through its very dispersal. Emphasizing the palimpsestic nature of urban space, Hood uses a number of strategies to draw the reader's attention to alternative spatial practices. The representation of the city as a process is emphasized by the text's attention in a number of stories at the margins of urban expansion. By making visible the process that produces and reproduces the urban, the text works to make the city comprehensible to its inhabitants, and to "disalienate" them.

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Gail Scott's Main Brides, a textual intervention into the urban spaces of Montreal during the time immediately following the Montreal Massacre of Dec. 6, 1989, examines the ways in which urban spaces invite and deny women's belonging. The portraits of the main character, Lydia, invite the reader to engage in an active process of reading and interpreting history as it is played out on the surfaces of the city and the bodies of its citizens. The textual fragments of Main Bodies emphasize juxtaposition, simultaneity, and surface-- characteristics of space rather than time.