The Sense of the Sacred in the Early Novels of Quebec
The Sense of the Sacred in the Early Novels of Quebec

Author: Lisa M. Gasbarrone

Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP

Published: 2024-10-15

Total Pages: 389

ISBN-13: 0228022479

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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.

Burning Questions
Burning Questions

Author: Margaret Atwood

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2022-03-01

Total Pages: 394

ISBN-13: 0385547501

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In this brilliant selection of essays, the award-winning, best-selling author of The Handmaid's Tale and The Testaments offers her funny, erudite, endlessly curious, and uncannily prescient take on everything from whether or not The Handmaid’s Tale is a dystopia to the importance of how to define granola—and seeks answers to Burning Questions such as... • Why do people everywhere, in all cultures, tell stories? Including thoughts on the writing of The Handmaid’s Tale, The Testaments, Oryx & Crake, and Atwood's other beloved works. • How much of yourself can you give away without evaporating? • How can we live on our planet? • Is it true? And is it fair? • What do zombies have to do with authoritarianism? In more than fifty pieces, Atwood aims her prodigious intellect and impish humor at the world, and reports back to us on what she finds. This roller-coaster period brought the end of history, a financial crash, the rise of Trump, and a pandemic. From when to dispense advice to the young (answer: only when asked) to Atwood’s views on the climate crisis, we have no better guide to the many and varied mysteries of our universe.

Finding Kluskap
Finding Kluskap

Author: Jennifer Reid

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published: 2015-09-30

Total Pages: 134

ISBN-13: 0271062584

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The Mi’kmaq of eastern Canada were among the first indigenous North Americans to encounter colonial Europeans. As early as the mid-sixteenth century, they were trading with French fishers, and by the mid-seventeenth century, large numbers of Mi’kmaq had converted to Catholicism. Mi’kmaw Catholicism is perhaps best exemplified by the community’s regard for the figure of Saint Anne, the grandmother of Jesus. Every year for a week, coinciding with the saint’s feast day of July 26, Mi’kmaw peoples from communities throughout Quebec and eastern Canada gather on the small island of Potlotek, off the coast of Nova Scotia. It is, however, far from a conventional Catholic celebration. In fact, it expresses a complex relationship between the Mi’kmaq, Saint Anne, a series of eighteenth-century treaties, and a cultural hero named Kluskap. Finding Kluskap brings together years of historical research and learning among Mi’kmaw peoples on Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia. The author’s long-term relationship with Mi’kmaw friends and colleagues provides a unique vantage point for scholarship, one shaped not only by personal relationships but also by the cultural, intellectual, and historical situations that inform postcolonial peoples. The picture that emerges when Saint Anne, Kluskap, and the mission are considered in concert with one another is one of the sacred life as a site of adjudication for both the meaning and efficacy of religion—and the impact of modern history on contemporary indigenous religion.

Everyday Sacred
Everyday Sacred

Author: Hillary Kaell

Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP

Published: 2017-11-07

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 077355243X

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Over the last decade there has been ongoing discussion about the place of religion in Québécois society, particularly following the proposed Charter of Quebec Values in 2013. The essays in Everyday Sacred emerged from this active and often tense period of debate. Revitalizing an awareness of how people encounter, create, and employ religion in everyday life, contributors to this volume explore communities’ networks of beliefs, traditions, and relationships. Through broad comparisons beyond the Quebec context, contributors look at African Pentecostal congregations, an Iraqi Jewish community in Montreal, a rural Catholic parish on the Saint Lawrence River, and Tewehikan drumming in Wemotaci. They also examine wayside crosses, places of pilgrimage and devotion, debates on the regulation of the hijab, and the place of Montreal Spiritualists and transhumanists in the religious landscape. Seeking a holistic definition of Québécois religion, Everyday Sacred considers religious and secular identity, pluralism, the bodily and material aspects of religion, the impact of gender on community and the public sphere, and the rise of hybridity, sociality, and new technologies in transnational and online networks, in order to uncover the transmission of practices and beliefs from one generation to another. Disrupting familiar dichotomies between Catholicism and other religions, “founders” and immigrants, new religious movements and traditional institutions, Everyday Sacred marks the beginning of a sustained conversation on contemporary religion in Quebec, both inside and outside of the province. Contributors include: Emma Anderson (University of Ottawa), Randall Balmer (Dartmouth College), Hélène Charron (Université Laval), Elysia Guzik (University of Toronto), Laurent Jérôme (Université du Québec à Montréal), Norma B. Joseph (Concordia University), Cory Andrew Labrecque (Université Laval), Deirdre Meintel (Université de Montréal), Géraldine Mossière (Université de Montréal), Frédéric Parent (Université de Québec à Montréal), Meena Sharify-Funk (Wilfrid Laurier University).