Female Authorship, Incomplete Archives, and the Periodical Press in Nineteenth-Century Montreal: The Case of Rosanna Mullins Leprohon

This article revolves around a case study of Montreal-based, Irish-Canadian author Rosanna Mullins Leprohon (1829-1879) who left behind little to no material archive after her death in 1879. Leprohon’s example serves to highlight the scholarly challenges that inhere in defining Canadian women’s authorship in the nineteenth century. The article is divided into two parts: focussing on the Journal of Education for Lower Canada (Montreal, 1857-1879), the first half argues that Leprohon’s periodical poetry played a greater role than previously understood in defining the terms of her authorship in Confederation-period Montreal. Examining archival documents belonging to her late husband and held in the Fonds Jean-Lukin Leprohon, the second half demonstrates the challenges that inhere in reconstructing women’s authorship through the archives of men-of-letters. Although they may never make up for the absence of private correspondence written in her own voice, Rosanna Leprohon’s periodical poems represent valuable resources for reconstructing the terms of her authorship and visibility in Montreal in the middle decades of the nineteenth century.Cet article s’articule autour d’une étude de cas sur l’écrivaine montréalaise Rosanna Mullins Leprohon (1829-1879) qui n’a laissé que peu d’archives matérielles après sa mort en 1879. Le cas de Leprohon sert à illuminer des défis méthodologiques auxquels font face les chercheur·e·s qui visent à mieux comprendre la vie d’auteure de femmes canadiennes du dix-neuvième siècle. L’argumentaire se décline en deux volets : le premier propose que la poésie de Leprohon, parue dans la revue mensuelle The Journal of Education for Lower Canada (Montréal, 1857-1879), permet de mieux saisir les termes genrés de sa visibilité en tant qu’écrivaine montréalaise de la période de la Confédération. En examinant des documents d’archives appartenant à son défunt mari et conservés dans le Fonds Jean-Lukin Leprohon, le deuxième volet démontre l’ampleur des défis qui se posent aux chercheur·e·s quand ces derniers sont obligés de reconstruire les vies littéraires d’écrivaines par l’intermédiaire d’hommes de lettres. Bien qu’ils ne puissent jamais compenser l’absence de correspondances rédigées de sa propre main, les poèmes de Rosanna Leprohon parus dans The Journal of Education permettent de reconstruire les termes de sa visibilité en tant qu’écrivaine montréalaise et de sa réception littéraire au XIXe siècle

Francophone Acadian Literature as an Ultraminor Literature

This essay takes four novels by Acadian fiction-writer France Daigle as case studies of a phenomenon it defines as ultraminor. It develops the concept of the ultraminor in relation to Acadian literature, a doubly dominated literature positioned uneasily between centers of cultural influence in Paris and Montreal. The author conceives of the ultraminor as a writing strategy and a method of critical reading. As a writing strategy, the ultraminor aims to transcend dual marginality while establishing new frames of reference defined on local terms. As a dialectical critical method, the ultraminor exposes the binaries that novelists such as Daigle seek to transcend—between center and periphery and cultural normativity and emergence—while remaining caught within the terms of the original double-bind. Viewed from the lens of Daigle’s novels, the ultraminor complicates Casanova’s model of polycentrism by rendering intercultural relations among literary centers and peripheries at once dynamic and vulnerable to pressures from the margins.</jats:p

<i>Plagiarizing Sir Walter Scott: The Afterlife of Kenilworth in Victorian Quebec</i>

In 1880, the French Canadian journalist and politician Frédéric Houde published his only novel, Le manoir mystérieux, ou les victimes de l'ambition, in the Montreal daily newspaper Le nouveau monde. Then Houde's novel seems to have disappeared from the public eye until 1913, when it was recovered, published in book form, and lauded as an original and meritorious text. One year later, a front-page article in the weekly Le nationaliste (Montreal, 1904–24) revealed that Le manoir mystérieux was a plagiarism of Sir Walter Scott's Kenilworth (1821). Since then, few literary historians have examined Le manoir mystérieux in the wider context of novelistic production in Quebec in the late nineteenth century. Drawing from recent scholarship in the fields of book history and print culture, this article proposes that a close examination of Le manoir mystérieux's contents, together with the material conditions that surrounded its publication in 1880, exposes a wider range of approaches to literary authorship and acceptable literary practice in nineteenth-century Quebec than literary historians have heretofore considered appropriate. The author shifts attention away from the Romantic conceptions of literary originality that have narrowed the range of critical responses to Le manoir mystérieux largely to questions about the ethical repercussions of Houde's literary theft. Instead, she argues that Le manoir mystérieux is metonymous of a larger embattled, albeit creative, mode through which the historical novel developed in Quebec.</jats:p