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10 - War and the Holocaust
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- By Denis Boak
- Edited by Timothy Unwin, University of Liverpool
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- Book:
- The Cambridge Companion to the French Novel
- Published online:
- 28 May 2006
- Print publication:
- 28 October 1997, pp 161-178
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- Chapter
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Summary
Writing on war did not begin with the twentieth century. Far from it: the whole tradition of epic can be defined as, precisely, literature of war. Nevertheless it is only in our own century that it has expanded to become a major genre. There are of course nineteenth-century antecedents in French: best known, La Chartreuse de Parme, where Stendhal takes Fabrice del Dongo on a gratuitous excursion to Waterloo. But these pages, famous though they are, amount to less than a tenth of a very long novel. Zola's La Débâcle (1892) is the most important individual nineteenth-century novel devoted to the theme of war, taking in its sweep both the Franco-Prussian War and the Commune which followed. La Débâcle has acted as a seminal work, since many of the typical incidents of First- and Second-World-War narratives appear, if only in embryo, in its pages, together with the dominant theme of war as confusion, a humiliating shambles. And at the same time as presenting the war as experienced by individual characters, Zola succeeds in incorporating into his fiction a bird's eye survey of the conflict, almost from a historian's viewpoint, in a way no writer was to emulate until Jules Romains in the late 1930s. His description of the shattering defeat of the French armies at the hands of the Prussians prefigures, precisely, the even greater debacle of May-June 1940.
13 - The French-Canadian novel
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- By Denis Boak
- Edited by Timothy Unwin, University of Liverpool
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- Book:
- The Cambridge Companion to the French Novel
- Published online:
- 28 May 2006
- Print publication:
- 28 October 1997, pp 214-222
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- Chapter
- Export citation
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Summary
Although in recent years French-Canadian writers, like their counterparts in other Francophone communities, have been energised by nationalism, the literary development of French-speaking Canada bears only a superficial resemblance to that elsewhere. Its conquest, by the British, goes back well over two centuries, but Canada has been politically independent from Britain since 1867, with Quebec as one of its founding provinces. What has happened there since has been the responsibility of its own citizens; and the fifty thousand French of the mid-eighteenth century, far from being swamped in a flood of English-speaking immigrants, have grown to seven millions. Montreal, a small, largely English-speaking town in the early nineteenth century, is now a vast metropolis, by far the biggest Francophone city outside Paris.
Formerly the term 'French-Canadian' was used to cover all Francophone Canadian literature; since the 1960s, it has been superseded by 'Quebec', 'québécois'. In some ways this term is less clear, even tendentious, since it sidelines writers from outside Quebec, such as Gabrielle Roy, from Manitoba, often considered Canada's greatest Francophone novelist, or Antonine Maillet, born in New Brunswick, the only Canadian Goncourt prizewinner. 'Québécois' also excludes Anglophone writers who draw their inspiration from the 'belle province', of whom the best-known is Mordecai Richler. Be this as it may, in French Canada we find the most vigorous of all non-French Francophone literary cultures, and from its rich stock of novels only a few salient titles can be cited. The present essay is of course written from the viewpoint of an interested Anglophone observer.