Bibliographie
BELL John, “Uneasy Union: Further Examples of English-Language Science Fiction Concerning Canadian Separatist Conflicts,” Science-Fiction Studies, 9, 1982, 82-88.
BELL John, “The Persistence of Division: Further Examples of English-Language Science Fiction Concerning Canadian Separatist Conflicts,” Science-Fiction Studies, 11, 1984, 190-193.
Carens James, The Satiric Art of Evelyn Waugh, Washington: U of Washington P, 1966.
Colas-Charpentier Hélène, “Four Québécois Dystopias 1963-1972,“ Science-Fiction Studies, 20, 1993, 383-393.
COLOMBO John Robert, “Four Hundred Years of Fantastic Literature in Canada,” in Andrea Paradis (Ed.), Out of This World. Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature, Ottawa: Quarry / National Library of Canada, 1995, 28-40.
Fineman Noel, “The History of the Anecdote: Fiction and Fiction,” in H. Aram Veeser (Ed.), The New Historicism, New York & London: Routledge, 1989, 49-76.
Gallagher Catherine, “Marxism and the New Historicism,” in H. Aram Veeser (Ed.), The New Historicism, New York & London: Routledge, 1989, 37-48.
Heiserman A. R., “Satire in Utopia,” PMLA, 78, 1963, 163-74.
Ketterer David, Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1992.
NEW W. H., A History of Canadian Literature, London: MacGill-Queen’s University Press, 1989.
Weiss Allan, “Separations and Unities: Approaches to Québec Separatism in English- and French-Canadian Fantastic Literature,” Science-Fiction Studies, 25, 1998, 53-61.
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Notes
Noel Fineman, “The History of the Anecdote: Fiction and Fiction,” in H. Aram Veeser (Ed.), The New Historicism, New York and London: Routledge, 1989, 53.
Cf. Catherine Gallagher, “Marxism and the New Historicism,” in Veeser 1989, 37.
Allan Weiss, “Separations and Unities : Approaches to Québec Separatism in English- and French-Canadian Fantastic Literature,” Science-Fiction Studies, 25, 1998, 59.
Weiss 1998, 55. Five years after the last referendum on Quebec separation this conflict is still an issue of major importance; its liveliness is far from suffering from the defeat of those who refused to accept the new constitutional deal enacted in 1982, who voted “yes”" in 1980 (40%) and yet again in 1995 (49%). See the article by Wsevolod W. Isajiw, “Quebec in Question,” in Wsevolod W. Isajiw (Ed.), Understanding Diversity: Ethnicity and Race in the Canadian Context, Toronto: TEP, 1999, 226-33.
See John Robert Colombo, “Four Hundred Years of Fantastic Literature in Canada,” in Andrea Paradis (Ed.), Out of This World. Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature, Ottawa : Quarry / National Library of Canada, 1995, 39, and David Ketterer, Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy, Bloomington and Indianapolis : Indiana UP, 1992, 71f.
What francophone Quebec writers feared, by contrast, was the threat of a nuclear war, and so the 1960s and 1970s saw the publication of a series of dystopias such as Yves Thériault’s Si la bombe m’était contée (1962), Suzanne Martel’s Quatre Montréalais en l’an 3000 (1963) and Maurice Gagnon’s Les Tours de Babylone (1972). For a more detailed account see Hélène Colas-Charpentier, “Four Québécois Dystopias 1963-1972,” Science-Fiction Studies, 20, 1993, 383-393; John BELL, “Uneasy Union : Further Examples of English-Language Science Fiction Concerning Canadian Separatist Conflicts,” Science-Fiction Studies, 9, 1982, 82-88, and “The Persistence of Division : Further Examples of English-Language Science Fiction Concerning Canadian Separatist Conflicts,” Science-Fiction Studies, 11, 1984, 190-193.
See Colombo, 1995, 39.
See Weiss 1998, 57. The earliest francophone text of the genre is Jules-Paul Tardivel’s Pour la patrie (1895), which concerns a conspiracy by Canada’s English Protestant minority to change the country’s political system from a federation into a legislative union. It was followed by another work from the extreme political right, Ubald Paquin’s La Cité dans le fers (1925).
The other novels included in the tetralogy are The Disinherited (1974), The Sweet Summer of Kitty Malone (1979) and Flowers of Darkness (1981).
Matt Cohen, The Colours of War, Kingston, Ontario: Quarry, 1993, 144.
Ibid., 59.
Ibid., 60.
See W. H. NEW, A History of Canadian Literature, London : MacGill-Queen’s University Press, 1989, for an account of Margaret Atwood’s “cultural affiliations to Loyalist Ontario” as opposed to the claim to nationhood and cultural autonomy voiced by many writers and intellectuals born in disloyal Quebec. New argues that, although one of Atwood’s main concerns is to counter the restraint imposed on political articulateness by the “ ‘circle game’ of the small-town Loyalist inheritance in Canada,” her inherited idiom is nevertheless both an “inhibition” and the “chief available means by which to free oneself from inhibition” (294).
Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale, Toronto, Canada: McClelland & Stewart, 1985, 288.
Ibid., 289.
Weiss 1998, 53.
Ibid., 53.
Colombo 1995, 43.
Ibid., 43.
My admittedly rather disparaging judgement receives support from the views held by many critics and historians of Canadian literature. W. H. New, for instance, opines that “plurality was not a québécois ideal; unity was. ‘Nationhood’ was about to be redefined. With the Quiet Revolution underway in the 1960 [...] Quebec writers and politicians (they were often both) were drawing further away from Canada even as the anglophone version of Canada was shifting towards a norm of biculturalism [...] Writers began to seek structures of expression that would rephrase and so reinterpret their culture, free it from the definitions of the ‘Other,’ so to speak, and hence encode a new authenticity of self” (NEW, 1989, 212).
See NEW 1989, 217. In the 1960s several journals and magazines came into life that espoused the idea of a free, secular and separatist society in Quebec. Many of them allied themselves with Marxist thought, Sartrean existentialism and the whole process of decolonisation which during these years was bringing independence to former British and French colonies. Some writers of French Canadian origin were committed to the cause of an independent and socialist state in Quebec, insisting on the term ‘québecicité’ as a cultural marker of the ‘new’ culture’s distinct national consciousness.
See A. R. Heiserman, “Satire in Utopia,” PMLA, 78, 1963, 163-74.
James Carens, The Satiric Art of Evelyn Waugh, Washington : U of Washington P, 1966, 152.
William Weintraub, The Underdogs, Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1979, 101.
Ibid., 224.
Ibid., 17.
Ibid., 77.
Ibid., 96.
Ibid., 122.
Ibid., 148.
Ibid., 89.
Ibid., 53.
Ibid., 110.
Ibid., 104.
Ibid., 114.
Ibid., 79.
Ibid., 194.
Idem.
The origins of Canadian nationalism can be traced back to Donald Creighton’s immensely successful book Dominion of the North (1944), a conservative view of Canadian history that fastens on tensions between anglophone and francophone Canada as the distinguishing feature of Canadian society. Creighton had a direct influence on writers, in particular on Hugh MacLennan whose novel Two Solitudes (1945) neatly epitomised the prevailing national sensibility.
Weintraub 1979, 225.
Originally a joual term used to characterise Anglophone attitudes to the québécois. Joual was a Montreal dialect created in the 1960s to become a verbal medium of much new literary work and also a political comment in its own right. The role of language and speech as agents of political change is a major issue in Weintraub’s novel.
I am using the term here in the sense of Bill Ashcroft’s definition of postcolonial literatures as thriving on the abrogation of the institutional practices of a literary “patronage system” and on the “appropriation of language and writing for new and distinctive usages.” Bill Ashcroft et al., The Empire Writes Back. Theory and Practice in Postcolonial Literatures, London and New York : Routledge, 1989, 6.
Weiss 1998, 58.
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