Marie-Claire Blais seeks to innovate, throughout her career, her 'antimimétique' writing. Her extensive pentalogy - Soifs (1995), Dans la foudre et la lumière (2001), Augustino et le choeur de la destruction (2005), Naissance de Rebecca à l’ère des tourments (2008), Mai au bal des prédateurs (2010) – offers a complex existential questioning of the actual situation of the man. The problem of Evil and Good, which is in the heart of questions and answers, is treated with an original narration, transforming Virginia Woolf’s stream of consciousness. This innovation, however, is rooted in the tradition, namely its baroque poetics and its community orientation, both attached to the affirmation / negation of the catholic heritage that marked Quebec.
Written in French, but American in spirit, Quebec literature seems to have mostly resisted recent French literary patterns. Nevertheless, some important changes should be noticed since 2000, namely those concerning the roman familial (family novel) that underlies certain traditional genres such as the roman du terroir (novel of the soil) and the roman de la ville (novel of the town). Recent social and cultural developments, the irruption and integration of “migrant literature” into the Quebec literary canon have been transforming the long‐standing community characteristics of Quebec literature. This transformation generates a new imaginary, close to such concepts as enracinerrance (root‐roving) or pensée de la trace (thought of the trace) or spatiality of the in‐between. Those tendencies, resembling the characteristic features of the French récit de filiation (filiation narrative), are illustrated through two novels – La Fiancée américaine by Éric Dupont and Nikolski by Nicolas Dickner.
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