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The stranger (survenant) represents an important theme in Quebec literature of the second half of the twentieth century. This book analyses the role of the survenant in five major novels dating from 1945 to 1992 and shows how the theme is constantly reworked and revitalised by the authors selected. The arrival of a survenant in a community brings to the surface the conflicts and tensions which had been latent. The consequences can be tragic for all concerned. At the least the community is changed forever. This is the first study of the way in which different Quebecois authors treat the survenant and should be of interest to all students of Quebec literature and culture.
Gabrielle Roy and the creative ambivalence of bilingualism.
Times change, lives change, and the terms we need to describe our literature or society or condition—what Raymond Williams calls “keywords”—change with them. Perhaps the most significant development in the quarter-century since Eli Mandel edited his anthology Contexts of Canadian Criticism has been the growing recognition that not only do different people need different terms, but the same terms have different meanings for different people and in different contexts. Nation, history, culture, art, identity—the positions we take discussing these and other issues can lead to conflict, but also hold the promise of a new sort of community. Speaking of First Nations people and their literature, Beth Brant observes that “Our connections … are like the threads of a weaving. … While the colour and beauty of each thread is unique and important, together they make a communal material of strength and durability.” New Contexts of Canadian Criticism is designed to be read, to work, in much the same manner.
Through an analysis of the strategies adopted by Helene Cixous, Madeleine Gagnon, Nicole Brossard, and Jeanne Hyvrard as they rework maternal and (pro)creative metaphors and play with language and conventions of genre, Milena Santoro identifies a transatlantic community of women writers who share a subversive aesthetic that participates in, even as it transforms, the tradition of the avant-garde in twentieth-century literature.".
This volume brings together a group of most highly acclaimed Canadian writers and distinguished international experts on Canadian literature to discuss what potential Janice Kulyk Keefer's concept of "historiographic ethnofiction" has for ethnic writing in Canada. The collection builds upon Kulyk Keefer's idea but also moves beyond it by discussing such realms of the concept as its ethics and aesthetics, multiple and multilayered sites, generic intersections, and diasporic (con-)texts. Thus, focusing on Canadian historiographic ethnofiction, "Land Deep in Time" is the first study to define and explore a type of writing which maintains a marked presence in Canadian literature but has not yet been recognized as a separately identifiable genre.
In Women and Narrative Identity Green demonstrates that the "national text" has at times functioned to constrain women's literary expression, while in other cases it has empowered the feminine voice, endowing it with a unique identitary power. She shows that writers such as Laure Conan, Germaine Guèvremont, Gabrielle Roy, Anne Hébert, and Marie-Claire Blais have been recognized as important because they have been widely perceived as speaking to and about the people of Quebec. The Quebec identity narrative has offered women writers a framework within which they are able not only to make their voices heard but to tell a story of feminine dispossession and desire that often questions central cultural values. Green shows that while women writers in Europe and America have subtly altered the form of the novel, in Quebec women have, in rewriting the narratives of Quebec identity, also redefined the terms of the nation itself.
Maintaining that women's storytelling is a telling activity, Karen McPherson "reads for guilt" in novels by five twentieth-century writers--Simone de Beauvoir (L'Invitée), Marguerite Duras (Le ravissement de Lol V. Stein), Anne Hébert (Kamouraska), Virginia Woolf (Mrs. Dalloway), and Nicole Brossard (Le désert mauve). She finds in the vocabulary and atmosphere of these novels a linking of female protagonists to crime and culpability. The guilt, however, is not clearly imputed or assumed; it tends to trouble the conscience of the entire narrative. Through critical close readings and an inquiry into the interrelations among narration, transgression, and gender, McPherson explores how the wo...
Provides the first history of the North American farm novel, a genre which includes John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, Sheila Watson's The Double Hook, and Louis Hémon's Maria Chapdelaine. From John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath and Martha Ostenso's Wild Geese to Louis Hémon's Maria Chapdelaine, some of the most famous works of American, English Canadian, and French Canadian literature belongto the genre of the farm novel. In this volume, Florian Freitag provides the first history of the genre in North America from its beginnings in the middle of the nineteenth century to its apogee in French Canada around the middleof the twentieth. Through surveys and selected detailed analyses of a...