Roman du terroir

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The roman du terroir ( French Roman des Terroir ; rural novel), also roman de la terre , was from 1846 to 1945 a dominant genre in francophone fiction in the east of the province of Canada (from 1867 province of Québec ). The Paternal Farm (1846) by Patrice Lacombe is considered the first roman du terroir . Germaine Guèvremont's novels Le Survenant (1945) and Marie-Didace (1947) are considered the last and most important representatives of this genre.

Content and goals

At a time of massive industrialization (19th and early 20th centuries), the roman du terroir idealized rural life in Québec. He moved the French language, traditional family concepts and life shaped by Catholicism and agriculture into focus. The presentation of traditions and the continuous transmission of values ​​played an important role. The work of the peasants was characterized as arduous but free. To emphasize the healthy life on the Québec homesteads , it was contrasted with the dangerous big city life and the harsh working conditions in the factories: loneliness, alcoholism, work accidents, moral brutality and even murder are the consequences for characters who leave the rural area . In this sense, the titles of the novels are already speaking: Restons chez nous (We stay at home), La Terre que l'on défend (The earth that one defends), La Terre ancestrale (The ancestral land) or La Terre se venge ( The earth takes revenge).

The Roman Catholic priesthood and regional government promoted the genre. In the programmatic essay Le mouvement littéraire en Canada (1866), which was considered a guideline for many French-Canadian authors for decades, Abbé Henri-Raymond Casgrain presented Catholic morality and patriotism as the highest goals of literature. The roman du terroir was supposed to be moral Raise the awareness of the rural population and help curb rural exodus. Put simply: stay at home, stay near the church and stay away from the Anglais . The aim was to convey to readers that the future of all French-Canadians depends on whether they would live up to their "historic calling to colonize New France ."

Important representatives of the novel genre were:

Effect and further development

His moral conservatism brought the roman du terroir “in stark contrast” to contemporary literature in France . Some novels of this genre looked like "propaganda in the service of agriculture". : 138 Its last representatives, however, already showed breaks in the urban-rural dichotomy : They no longer idealized rural life without restrictions, but the sense of duty towards their ancestors keeps the protagonists in the country or pulls them back there.

In the 1940s the roman du terroir was replaced by urban novels (by Gabrielle Roy , Yves Thériault , Roger Lemelin etc.). Nevertheless, traces of the genre can still be found in Québec literature - both in nostalgic affirmation and in opposing positions. These anti-romans du terroir (also "anti-terroir") include u. a. Marie-Claire Blais ' La Belle Bête (1959), which systematically displays all the dominant values ​​of the roman du terroir , or Claude-Henri Grignon's modernist novel Un Homme et son péché (1933, 1935), which satirically depicts rural life.

literature

  • Tatiana Munteanu: Quelques considérations sur le roman québécois “du terroir” (PDF file), DOCT-US Journal 2/2 (2010) pp. 67–70 (French)
  • Reingard M. Nischik (Ed.): History of literature in Canada: English-Canadian and French-Canadian . Rochester, 2008 ISBN 978-1-57113-359-5 (and more recent works by this author)
  • Colette Windish: "Du roman de terroir au feuilleton de l'été: Vers un nouvel imaginaire populaire français?", In: Contemporary French & Francophone Studies 11/1 (2007) pp. 137–145
  • William H. New: A History of Canadian Literature . McGill-Queen's University Press, 2003 ISBN 9781561310401 (and more recent works by this author)
  • Klaus-Dieter Ertler : Small history of the French-Canadian novel . Gunter Narr, Tübingen 2000 ISBN 9783823349792
    • dsb .: The French-Canadian novel of the thirties. An ideology-analytical representation. Series: Canadiana Romanica, 14. de Gruyter, Berlin 2000
  • Yannick Gasquy-Resch (Ed.): Littérature du Québec . Edicef, 1994 ISBN 978-2841290024
  • Uta Chaudhury: The French-Canadian "roman de la terre". A development study. European University Studies - Publications universitaires européennes, Dept. Langue et littérature françaises, 38. Peter Lang, Bern 1976. Zugl. Diss. Phil. University of Tübingen , New Philology, 1975/1976

Remarks

  1. ↑ Reston chez nous of Damase Potvin (1908), La Terre que l'on Défend by Henri Lapointe (1928), La Terre ancestrale of Louis-Philippe Côté (1933) or La Terre se venge of Eugénie Chenel (1932).
  2. ↑ The basic idea of terroir was also followed by poets, and others. a. Nérée Beauchemin ( Patrie intime ), Alfred Desrochers ( À l'ombre de l'Orford ), Blache Lamontagne ( Par nos champs et par nos rives ), Albert Ferland ( Le Canada chanté ).

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b René Dionne, Littérature de langue française at: encyclopediecanadienne.ca, accessed on September 15, 2015 (French, English ).
  2. ↑ Diane Sabourin, Le Survenant / The Outlander at: encyclopediecanadienne.ca, accessed on September 15, 2015 (French, English ).
  3. ^ Paul Perron, Narratology and Text: Subjectivity and Identity in New France and Québécois Literature . University of Toronto Press, 2003 ISBN 978-0802036889S. 152.
  4. ^ A b Réjean Robidoux and André Renaud, Le roman canadien-français du XXe siècle . University of Ottawa Press, 1966, p. 26.
  5. ^ Catherine Fowler, Representing the Rural: Space, Place, and Identity in Films about the Land Wayne State University Press, 2006 ISBN 978-0814335628 p. 63.
  6. ^ "Casgrain, Henri-Raymond" in: Dictionnaire biographique du Canada (Online), accessed on September 15, 2015 (French, English ).
  7. ↑ a b c Jean-Louis Lessard, La littérature du terroir au Québec at: laurentiana.blogspot.ca, accessed on September 15, 2015 (French).
  8. ^ Caroline Desbiens, Power from the North: Territory, Identity, and the Culture of Hydroelectricity in Quebec . University of British Columbia Press, 2013 ISBN 978-0774824187 pp. 94-5.
  9. ^ Fritz Peter Kirsch, "French-Canadian Literature from National Solidarity to the École littéraire de Montréal", in: Reingard M. Nischik (ed.), History of literature in Canada: English-Canadian and French-Canadian . Rochester, 2008 ISBN 978-1-57113-359-5 pp. 127-146.
  10. ^ Patrick Corcoran, The Cambridge Introduction to Francophone Literature . Cambridge University Press, 2007 ISBN 978-0-521-61493-1 p. 167.
  11. ↑ Antoine Sirois and Daniel Baird, Claude-Henri Grignon at: encyclopediecanadienne.ca, accessed on September 15, 2015 (French, English ).