A few centuries ago, not so far away..
The work considered the first Canadian novel is The History of Emily Montague, published in 1769 by Frances Brooke of England. This epistolary novel provides some unforgettable portraits of Quebec City. But it was not until the 19th century that the first literary works were written by Quebecers. We think of Louis-Joseph Papineau, Octave Crémazie or Edmond de Nevers. For example, Pierre-Joseph-Olivier Chauveau published the novel Charles Guérin in 1846, most of which was set in Quebec City. A few years earlier, Charles Dickens had visited North America and offered a glimpse of it in his travel journal American notes. Quebec City is depicted in it.
A teeming and innovative 20th century
In the 20th century, there was a succession of Parisian influence, local literature, great darkness, the demand for autonomy, the avant-garde, and the literary decentering that has been going on since the 1980s. Many writers have left their mark on Quebec City during this rich 20th century. Marie-Claire Blais, for example, held an important place in Quebec literature. Born in Quebec City in 1939 and dying in Florida in 2021, she depicted dark and tormented worlds and developed themes of solitude and marginality. A Season in the Life of Emmanuel won the Prix Médicis in France in 1966 and has been made into a film. Her novel Visions d'Anna won the Académie française prize in 1983. In 1994, she joined the Académie des lettres du Québec and, in 1999, she was made a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres. She has received two awards for her body of work: the Prix Gilles-Corbeil in 2005 and the Canada Council for the Arts Molson Prize in 2016. Réjean Ducharme is an immense Quebec author who has produced a body of work that is too little known. His superb novel L'Avalée des avalés (1966) was a great success upon its release in France and Quebec. Other major works such as Le Nez qui vogue (1967), numerous literary awards, the writing of two screenplays and even some forty songs, including the famous Mon pays
for Robert Charlebois, followed. The author passed away on August 21, 2017 and has since been the subject of a well-deserved revival of interest. Also worth mentioning are the globe-trotting Alain Grandbois (1900-1975) and his Né à Québec (1933), Anne Hébert's (1916-2000) Les Fous de Bassan , Chrystine Brouillet's detective novels(Le Collectionneur, set in Quebec City), Alain Beaulieu's works, and those of feminist and LGBT activist Nicole Brossard. And there are other names to discover this rich and varied literature: Jacques Côté, Esther Croft, Martine Delvaux, Denise Desautels, Hélène Dorion, Anne-Marie Olivier, Gilles Pellerin... Gabrielle Roy, born in Manitoba in 1909, was a schoolteacher before moving to Europe and then settling in Quebec City, where she remained until her death in 1983. Her novels deal with urban life, modest environments and their obscure destinies(Bonheur d'occasion, Prix Femina, 1947). Finally, let us mention Félix-Antoine Savard. His first novel, Menaud, maître-draveur (1937), made him famous and the following year earned him a prize from the Académie française. This novel is among the most important nationalist works in Quebec. Numerous other works were published in the following decades, many of which earned him important awards and honours, including Officer of the Order of Canada in 1968.New authors
Today, we can see in contemporary Quebec literature an even stronger desire to celebrate the Quebec language and to break free from a certain normativity of the language conveyed by French literature. Young authors are happily mixing English with French, while celebrating Quebec idioms, as Réjean Ducharme did in the 1960s.
Every fall since 2010, the city has hosted the Québec en toutes lettres festival, which promotes literature through discoveries, writing and reading challenges, and other activities. Each year, great authors rub shoulders with new regional revelations for a single key word: audacity! We can say it: it's the Event! Comics are not forgotten in Quebec City, because since 1988, the Quebec Comics Festival has been held every spring: author meetings, exhibitions, and various activities. If we had to name only one comic book author, it would be Michel Rabagliati, one of the leaders of the Quebecois comic book industry. His character Paul is the hero of a series of ten semi-autobiographical albums, the sixth of which, Paul à Québec
, published in 2009 by La Pastèque, received several awards including the FNAC-SNCF public prize at the Angoulême festival in 2010. A film adaptation was released in Quebec in 2015. In this album, the action takes place around the year 2000 when Paul routinely travels to Quebec City to visit his father-in-law. His father-in-law is suffering from cancer and is slowly fading away. At the same time, Paul and Lucie are looking for a quiet and cozy home to raise their daughter. A moving family story. Also worth mentioning is the House of Literature. Nestled in a former Methodist church from 1848, it is a unique concept in North America. It encompasses several domains and houses several places: a public library, a permanent exhibition on Quebec literature, but also a writers' residence, writing rooms, a comic book workshop, a creative studio... Incredible, isn't it? Researchers, authors and simply lovers of literature are sure to find their happiness in this temple of literature. The Maison de la Littérature also offers " La Promenade des écrivains ", a guided tour that compares real places and the representation that writers have given of them. A dozen or so tours allow you to discover the different neighborhoods of Quebec City through authors and themes such as detective stories and historical novels. Worth a try!
