There's no place like home : Space, place and identity in the contemporary francophone novel in Quebec

The literature of the Quiet Revolution tends to be read in terms of its engagement with the construction of a unified national identity. Since 1980, however, Québécois writing and culture has been increasingly theorized in terms of métissage, or transculture. Recent work on Quebec's francophone novel occasionally points to the hybrid quality of some earlier writings. It is this which the thesis partly explores, putting the texts of the Quiet Revolution into dialogue with more recent works. In so doing, it argues that, whilst lacking the self-conscious reflexivity of Quebec's post-1980 novel, a number of novels produced during the Quiet Revolution prefigure the deconstructive activity of their successors.Chapter 1 looks at representations of the urban, specifically Montreal, in two novels which have come to be canonical texts of the historical periods in which they were produced, namely, the Quiet Revolution and post-1980. Chapter 2 considers representations of the continental space in two roads novels by Québécois de souche, that is, by francophones of white, European descent, as well as in a novel by a Métis writer, and in a novel by a Uruguayan immigrant to Quebec. Chapter 3 looks at representations of the domestic, urban, and national spaces in a number of reworkings of the heterosexual romance. Chapter 4 considers representations of the local and the global in two novels which contain narratives around madness and addiction. Chapter 5 looks at representations of alternate worlds in two science fantasy novels and in a novel which is concerned with virtual reality.The thesis contributes to current knowledge of Québécois literature in its analysis of domestic, urban, rural, national, continental, and global spatial representations, as well as in its study of a number of works which have received little critical attention to date.