The renaissance of impasse in American/Quebec literary relations: Comparative readings of Carlyle, Emerson, Melville, Aquin, Ducharme and Beaulieu (Thomas Carlyle, England, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Herman Melville, Hubert Aquin, Rejean Ducharme, Victor-Levy

This study comprises a series of comparative readings of authors key to the high-cultural renaissances in the Romantic literature of nineteenth-century America and twentieth-century Quebec. The Introduction lays out the historical and theoretical foundation for such a cross-cultural, cross-temporal reading, by arguing that, on the basis of both intellectual/historical “influence” and a strong affinity of means and ends, the American Romantic canon should reasonably be extended to include Quebec writers from the 1960s. The comparative readings at issue thus approach the writers under scrutiny from the converging perspectives of literary history (as artists sharing in an intellectual tradition) and literary theory (as moderns or contemporaries similarly participating in a bid for “authority”). In the first instance, from the perspective of literary history, the assimilation of the highly representative thought and rhetorical practice of sixteenth-century French skeptic Michel de Montaigne into the mainstream of American Romanticism by such equally representative authors as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Herman Melville serves to suggest an explanation for the proximity of their ideas and aims with those of their twentieth-century Quebec counterparts. In the second, a survey of criticism on works from both periods complements that account by showing how such a complex body of criticism-it too enabled by a body of theory with verifiable affinities with the thought of Montaigne-tends to (re)duplicate the rhetorical practice of American and Quebec writers under scrutiny by finding in writers or critics from the opposite canon a call to autonomy, and thereby effectively assimilating them to their own enterprise.; Chapter One attempts to track the presence of Montaigne's philosophic skepticism at the center of the revolutionary poetics, prophecy, and politics of Thomas Carlyle, whose work is construed as basic to an understanding of the relationships between philosophical and political revolutions in the (post)Romantic era.; Building on the first chapter, the second approaches Emerson, not in the tradition of prophecy and ethical direction with which he is conventionally associated, but from the standpoint of the (Post)Romantic and Existentialist enterprise of (re)visionary mythmaking in which he played such a significant role.; Chapter Three concludes the thesis by bringing together the various dimensions of the problem engaged in Chapters One and Two, by a reading of Melville in relation to his devoted Quebec reader and student Beaulieu. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)...