The Sense of the Sacred in the Early Novels of Quebec

Quebec's early novels are full of sacred themes and motifs - devotional objects and practices, parables and scripture, priests and nuns, transcendence, divinity, and eternity. Yet the critical gaze of the past fifty years has seldom engaged the idea of the sacred in a sustained way. Indeed the presence of the sacred has alienated modern and postmodern readers who ignore or downplay its significance, leading to misguided assessments of these works as mediocre and even unreadable for contemporary audiences. The Sense of the Sacred in the Early Novels of Quebec reexamines seven classic novels at the foundations of Quebec's national literature: Patrice Lacombe's La Terre paternelle (1846), P.-J.-O. Chauveau's Charles Gu