Rosemary Chapman

An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and the OAPEN library. The question ‘What is Québécois literature?’ may seem innocent and answerable, yet Rosemary Chapman's compelling study shows that to answer it is to chart the cultural history of French Canada, to put francophone writing in Canada in postcolonial context and to ask whether literary history, with its focus on the nation, is in fact obsolete. This remarkable book will be compulsory reading for scholars well-versed in francophone postcolonial studies and will also act as an ideal introduction for Anglophone scholars of Canadian literature.

Gabrielle Roy is one of the best-known figures of Quebec literature, yet she spent much of the first thirty years of her life studying, working, and living in English. For Roy, as a member of Manitoba's francophone minority, bilingualism was a necessary strategy for survival and success. How did this bilingual and bicultural background help shape her work as a writer in French? The implications of her linguistic and cultural identity are explored in chapters looking at education, language, translation, and the representation of Canada's other minorities, from the immigrants in Western Canada to the Inuit of Ungava. What emerges is a new reading of Roy's work. Drawing on archival material, postcolonial theory, and translation studies, Between Languages and Cultures explores the traces and effects of Roy's intimate knowledge of English language and culture, challenging and augmenting the established view that her work is distinctly French-Canadian or Quebecois.

Francophone Literatures draws together extracts from novels written in French by writers from Francophone areas outside Europe. These areas include North Africa, Black Africa, the Caribbean and North America. The book includes the following features:* a general introduction, which outlines the rationale and purpose of the book* a literary and a linguistic commentary on each extract included* a separate bibliography accompanying each section* a glossary of linguistic terms. The above features enable students to contextualize the extracts, identify the key literary and linguistic features and political, social, and cultural themes, to embark on further study, and to achieve their own successful text analysis by means of the models provided. Unique in its analysis both of literary and linguistic techniques, Francophone Literatures is essential reading for students of Francophone studies.

Francophone Literatures draws together extracts from novels written in French by writers from Francophone areas outside Europe. These areas include North Africa, Black Africa, the Caribbean and North America. The book includes the following features:* a general introduction, which outlines the rationale and purpose of the book* a literary and a linguistic commentary on each extract included* a separate bibliography accompanying each section* a glossary of linguistic terms. The above features enable students to contextualize the extracts, identify the key literary and linguistic features and political, social, and cultural themes, to embark on further study, and to achieve their own successful text analysis by means of the models provided. Unique in its analysis both of literary and linguistic techniques, Francophone Literatures is essential reading for students of Francophone studies.

Notions of place and space offer a framework for a variety of readings of the novels of Quebec. Works from the mid-nineteenth to the late twentieth century are used to offer the reader a series of detailed textual analyses, but also to illuminate aspects of the geography and history of Quebec. The corpus chosen concentrates on novels by Quebec-born authors such as Patrice Lacombe, Anne Hebert, Michel Tremblay, Jacques Poulin and Madeleine Ouellette-Michalska, but also includes writers born outside Quebec, who have lived in and written about Quebec, such as Louis Hemon in the early twentieth century, Gabrielle Roy in the mid-twentieth century and Regine Robin in the late twentieth century. The wide historical span of the corpus opens up a range of issues affecting the representation of space, including colonialism, gender, Quebec's place in the wider world and the position and perspective of the 'migrant' writer."