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

Purdy, Anthony George

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0773507701 ISBN 13: 9780773507708

Casa editrice: McGill Queens Univ, 1990

Riassunto

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 Félix-Antoine Savard's Menaud, maître-draveur; the contradictions stemming from the use of a first-person, present-tense narrative in André Langevin's Poussière sur la ville; the problem of narrativity and history as it is raised in Hubert Aquin's Prochain épisode; and the way in which narrative voice functions in Anne Hébert'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.

Dettagli dell'edizione

• Editore: McGill Queens Univ
• Data di pubblicazione: 1990
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 0773507701
• ISBN 13: 9780773507708
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 200
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile
• Persona responsabile: non disponibile