Women and Narrative Identity: Rewriting the Quebec National Text

Women writers have made significant contributions to Quebec's ongoing process of cultural self-definition. Because the novel has traditionally played a central role in the construction of national identity, Quebec literary history has seen the continued production of identity narratives, which Jacques Godbout calls the "national text." Using the tools of contemporary feminist criticism and building on a tradition of work on Quebec women's writing, Mary Jean Green considers issues of national and cultural self-definition, situating the literary texts of Quebec women within a unique political and historical context while also relating them to the work of women writing in other cultural situations, from nineteenth-century Europe to the postcolonial francophone world.