The Margin Speaks is an exploration of the strategies by which two representative Canadian writers contest the dominant Euro-American discourse and create an independant local identity. While their works are informed by similar anti-colonial concerns, Margaret Laurence and Robert Kroetsch are different enough to make such a juxtaposition rewarding. Engaging in an outgoing dialectic between the centre and the periphery, challenging the myths and motifs of the Great Tradition, they are united in their project of adapting the transplanted culture to a New World setting and constructing a past for a new country.The reading offered here is to be seen as a contribution to the identification of the forms that textual resistance can take in post-colonial literature, a project which ultimately aims at an increased understanding of responses to cultural repression.