Abstract

In 1845, Francois-Xavier Garneau published L'Histoire du Canada depuis sa decouverte jusqu'a nos jours. Garneau' s history, focusing on the development of New France from 1534 until 1841, was undertaken in response to Lord Durham's Report (1839) in which Durham stated that French Canadians were a people without a history or a literature. The popularity and success of Garneau's narrative led to his being coined "historien national" and to the emergence of nationalist literature in French Canada. His text provided novelists with an abundance of recognizable images which are found in novels written from 1846 to 1981. Drawing on Hayden White's study of the writing of history and the narrative structures used by historians, this thesis will analyze the presentation of Garneau's data, the ideology found in his text, and the influence it has had on French Canadian fiction. Specifically, three types of novels will be studied: "le roman de la terre", "le roman historique" and "le roman contemporain"