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In Narratology and Text, Paul Perron examines the role that literature plays in the formation of French Canadian identity. Perron presents a narratological and semiotic analysis of canonical non-fictional and fictional texts from New France and Quebec, and illustrates how citizens of French Catholic origins living in Canada have constructed their identity by defining the self as part of a closed community founded in race, language, and religion, and as radically opposed to the other, constituted as an omnipresent heterogeneous threat to the homogenous group.
The first section of Perron's study is devoted to an historico-notional overview of some of the major contributors to the theory of narrative, especially that of A.J. Greimas. The second and third parts initially examine the primary and founding texts of first encounters, Jacques Cartier's Voyages of 1534 and 1535, and the Jesuit Relations, and then turn to discussions of six representative Québécois novels from the mid-nineteenth century to the end of the Duplessis era. Each work is examined in terms of its definitions of the self, the other, the group, the nation, language, race, and religion, as well as its treatment of the idea of place—the utopian here as opposed to a dystopian there or elsewhere. Fusing semiotics, narratology, stylistics, and literary and cultural theory with one of the only English-language studies on Greimas, this important work offers an original and thought-provoking contribution to studies of literature and semiotics.
| Preface | ||
| Pt. I | Narratology | |
| 1 | Introduction to Narratology | 3 |
| 2 | A. J. Greimas and Narratology | 18 |
| Pt. II | Discovery, Conversion, and Colonization | |
| 3 | First Encounters and Myth Making: Jacques Cartier's Voyages to New France | 41 |
| 4 | Settlement and Conversion: Jean de Brebeuf's Jesuit Relations of 1635 and 1636 | 57 |
| 5 | Founding Nations: Jesuit-Huron Relations in Seventeenth-Century New France | 77 |
| 6 | Narrating and Reading the Body: The Martyrdom of Isaac Jogues | 103 |
| Pt. III | Historiography and the Novel: Nation and Identity | |
| 7 | Before and after the Fall - The Historical Novel: Les Anciens Canadiens (The Canadians of Old) | 131 |
| 8 | Family, Group, and Nation in the Nineteenth-Century Agrarian Novel: La Terre paternelle (The Paternal Farm) | 152 |
| 9 | Nationalism and the Novel of Colonization: Maria Chapdelaine | 166 |
| 10 | On the Margins of Nation - The Realist Novel: La Scouine | 192 |
| 11 | History and the Urban Novel: Bonheur d'occasion (The Tin Flute) | 208 |
| 12 | Utopia, Family, and Nation - The Wilderness Novel: Agaguk | 230 |
| 13 | Conclusion | 255 |
| Notes | 259 | |
| Glossary | 313 | |
| Bibliography | 317 | |
| Index | 329 |
Overview
In Narratology and Text, Paul Perron examines the role that literature plays in the formation of French Canadian identity. Perron presents a narratological and semiotic analysis of canonical non-fictional and fictional texts from New France and Quebec, and illustrates how citizens of French Catholic origins living in Canada have constructed their identity by defining the self as part of a closed community founded in race, language, and religion, and as radically opposed to the other, constituted as an omnipresent...