A Certain Difficulty of Being: Essays on the Quebec Novel

By Anthony George Purdy and Anthony Purdy

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 F lix-Antoine Savard's Menaud, ma tre-draveur; the contradictions stemming from the use of a first-person, present-tense narrative in Andr Langevin's Poussi re sur la ville; the problem of narrativity and history as it is raised in Hubert Aquin's Prochain pisode; and the way in which narrative voice functions in Anne H bert'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.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0773507701
• ISBN13: 9780773507708
• Release Date: June 1990
• Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
• Length: 200 Pages