Canadian inferiority Canadians,concerned with national identity and prone to doubting whether they can produce art comparable to that of England or the United States,have been accused in the past of thinking that anything well-written must come from somewhere else.When Margaret Atwood was a young woman in the 1950s,this sense of Canadian inferiority was very prevalent.Some suggest this may have been because they saw themselves as a perennial second best, being citizens of a former colony of Great Britain-the motherland of the English language-and overshadowed as well by the larger and more self-reliant United States.Whatever the reasons,Canadians acquired what the famous Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye called "frostbite at the roots of the imagination"and were reading only what other nations produced as opposed to developing a literature of their own. xxxsj.cnCanadian inferiority • Canadians, concerned with national identity and prone to doubting whether they can produce art comparable to that of England or the United States, have been accused in the past of thinking that anything well-written must come from somewhere else. When Margaret Atwood was a young woman in the 1950s, this sense of Canadian inferiority was very prevalent. Some suggest this may have been because they saw themselves as a perennial second best, being citizens of a former colony of Great Britain-the motherland of the English language-and overshadowed as well by the larger and more self-reliant United States. Whatever the reasons, Canadians acquired what the famous Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye called "frostbite at the roots of the imagination" and were reading only what other nations produced as opposed to developing a literature of their own