2025/01/01 by Marie-Pier Luneau, Jean‐Philippe Warren · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Canadian Identity and History #French Literature and Critical Theory #Literature and Culture Studies
paper · doi:10.1080/17409292.2025.2454174
openalex publication_date 2025/01/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Studies on the romance novel have placed great emphasis on the importance of exoticism, whose function is, on the one hand, to “make the readers dream” of distant, carefree worlds in which they can more freely project themselves, and on the other hand, to communicate information that helps to alleviate the sense of guilt associated with reading these delegitimized, “futile” literary products. In Quebec, the most successful sentimental collection of the post-war period, “Roman d’amour,” published by Éditions Police-Journal, is surprisingly devoid of foreign spaces, every story being set in the Canadian province. Looking at a corpus of some 200 novels, this article seeks to understand the causes of this “exoticism without cosmopolitanism,” while examining what types of knowledge these narratives also carry.