Une poésie de dissidence : étude comparative de l'évolution des poésie québécoise et canadienne modernes à Montréal, 1925-1955

Type of resource
Author/collaborator
Title
Une poésie de dissidence : étude comparative de l'évolution des poésie québécoise et canadienne modernes à Montréal, 1925-1955
Abstract
The author's study is based on three hypotheses: that the modern poetry movements in English and French Canada followed a parallel evolution from 1920-25 to 1950-55; that Montreal was the central place, the crossroads city, where the two poetry movements emerged; and that comparative analyses of the works of representative English and French poets of the 1930s and 1940s illustrates that their texts were marked by common themes, basic questions, and problematics. The first part (six chapters) of the author's study is a comparative literary history of the birth and development of the two modern poetic movements in Montreal in the 1920s, 1930s, 1940s and 1950s. He analyzes the formation of the literary movements and the content of their programs, the evolution and alternation of schools of poetic theory, the grouping of poets around specialised journals and publishing houses, and the publication of influential collections of poems, anthologies, and books of criticism. The second part (five chapters) of the author's study deals with issues of content in some eighty collections written by twenty-three English and French poets. On the English Quebec side, the author examined the works of members of the McGill School (A.J.M. Smith, F.R. Scott, Leo Kennedy, A.M. Klein) and some independents (E.J. Pratt, Dorothy Livesay) in the 1920s and 1930s, to representatives of the Preview (Patrick Anderson, P.K. Page) and First Statement (Louis Dudek, Irving Layton) groups during the Second World War and the post-war period. On the French Quebec side, the author examined the poets of the 1930s (Robert Choquette, Alfred DesRochers, Jean Narrache, Clement Marchand) to the group of women poets (Medje Vezina, Simone Routier), to the "grands aînes" (Saint-Denys Garneau, Grandbois, Francois Hertel, Anne Hebert), and to the predecessors of l’Hexagone (Gilles Henault, Paul-Marie Lapointe, Roland Giguere). The author argues that even if their emphasis is not always on the same themes, his study tends to show that in many respects the two linguistic groups of Montreal poets were preoccupied with similar problems. In the 1930s and 1940s their texts generally give rise to a “poetry of dissent,” and during the wartime and post-war period the poets heralded a radical change, a profound transformation of Quebec and Canadian society. Finally, the author’s chapters on "the country" and "the temptation of eros" feature poets and themes which, as if by a compensatory phenomenon, deliberately try to forget the effects of the great depression and the chaos of war. During this period, two schools of literary criticism, European in origin but well established in Canada and Quebec, provided the methodological and logical tools for the author’s study: thematic criticism, which acquired a solid reputation with representatives such as Northrop Frye, George Woodcock, D. G. Jones and Gilles Marcotte, Jacques Blais, Andre Brochu; and sociological criticism, which has a strong following among critics and/or literary historians Ronald Sutherland, Peter Stevens, Louis Dudek, Jean-Charles Falardeau and Antoine Sirois.
Type
PhD dissertation
University
University of British Columbia
Place
Vancouver, BC
Date
1978
# of Pages
xii-465p.
Language
fr
URL
Citation
Giguère, Richard. “Une poésie de dissidence : étude comparative de l’évolution des poésie québécoise et canadienne modernes à Montréal, 1925-1955.” PhD dissertation, University of British Columbia, 1978. https://open.library.ubc.ca/media/stream/pdf/831/1.0094803/1.
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