A Certain Difficulty of Being: Essays on the Quebec Novel - Couverture rigide

Purdy, Anthony

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 0773507701 ISBN 13 : 9780773507708

Editeur : McGill-Queen's University Press, 1990

Synopsis

In the Preface to A Certain Difficulty of Being Purdy examines the kinds of discourse that deal with the novel in some nineteenth-century Quebec novel prefaces, thereby revealing a theme of generic denegation in the sense of "This is not a novel." Purdy goes on to explore the transition from epic to novel in Felix-Antoine Savard's Menaud, maitre-draveur; the contradictions stemming from the use of a first-person, present-tense narrative in Andre Langevin's Poussiere sur la ville; the problem of narrativity and history as it is raised in Hubert Aquin's Prochain episode; and the way in which narrative voice functions in Anne Hebert's Kamouraska. He also touches on the current debate concerning the boundaries between modernism and post-modernism. Purdy does not offer an all-embracing system to explain the development of narrative in the Quebec novel, but leads us to an understanding of how these particular novels function, each in its own socio-historical context, and how they achieve or fail to achieve what they set out to do. The thread that runs through the different chapters is a pragmatic concern with Quebec's historical "difficulty of being" as it informs in varying ways the narrative projects of the novels in question.

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Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: McGill-Queen's University Press
• Date d'édition: 1990
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 0773507701
• ISBN 13: 9780773507708
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 200
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible