Quebec’s early novels are full of sacred themes and motifs – devotional objects and practices, parables and scripture, priests and nuns, transcendence, divinity, and eternity. Yet the critical gaze of the past fifty years has seldom engaged the idea of the sacred in a sustained way. Indeed the presence of the sacred has alienated modern and postmodern readers who ignore or downplay its significance, leading to misguided assessments of these works as mediocre and even unreadable for contemporary audiences.

The Sense of the Sacred in the Early Novels of Quebec reexamines seven classic novels at the foundations of Quebec’s national literature: Patrice Lacombe’s La Terre paternelle (1846), P.-J.-O. Chauveau’s Charles Guérin (1853), Antoine Gérin-Lajoie’s Jean Rivard (1874), Philippe Aubert de Gaspé’s Les Anciens Canadiens (1863), Laure Conan’s Angéline de Montbrun (1884), Louis Hémon’s Maria Chapdelaine (1916), and Félix-Antoine Savard’s Menaud, maître-draveur (1937). Through chapters that focus on sacred themes, character analysis, narrative temporalities, and the hermeneutics of the sacred, Lisa Gasbarrone demonstrates that these novels are more nuanced and innovative than their reputation has allowed.

*The Sense of the Sacred in the Early Novels of Quebec *reintroduces readers to classic works of French-Canadian literature that ironically and provocatively cast their quarrel with modernity in that essentially modern form: the novel.

Lisa Gasbarrone is professor of French at Franklin & Marshall College.

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“This is an engaging and thoughtful book that opens up a neglected and often dismissed aspect of early Québécois literature.” Rosemary Chapman, University of Nottingham, UK

“Gasbarrone’s determination to go against the grain of recent literary criticism in Quebec itself shows an admirable independence of thought. The question she raises about the role of the sacred in these novels is a provocative and important one in today’s world.” Patrick Coleman, University of California, Los Angeles