About the author | About the book | Author's notes
"With this project, I hope to shed light on the emergence of field reporting practices in newspapers, practices about which little is yet known in Quebec and Canada."
About the author
Charlotte Biron is a professor in the Department of Literary Studies at the University of Quebec in Montreal. Her thesis, D'Arthur Buies à Gabrielle Roy, une histoire littéraire du reportage au Québec (1870-1945), was published in 2023 by Presses de l'Université de Montréal, and her master's thesis, Mavis Gallant et Gabrielle Roy, journalistes, was published in 2016 by Codicille éditeur. Her first novel, Jardin radio, published in 2022 by Éditions du Quartanier, won the CALQ-œuvre de la relève de Montréal award. Since 2022, she has been hosting the podcast Terrains d'écriture.
About the book
At the end of the 19th century, the birth of news journalism and reporting in French Canada contributed to the emergence of a field literature. Far removed from the adventurous scenarios that fueled the imagination of Western reporters, French-Canadian writers and journalists traveled across the vast territory of a scattered French-speaking population.
This book explores the history of literary reportage in Quebec: a literature that ranges from Arthur Buies' Deux mille deux cents lieues en chemin de fer to Gabrielle Roy's Peuples du Canada, including Jules Fournier's investigation of Franco-Americans and Éva Senécal's foray into the world of log drivers.The author was motivated to write this book by one key observation: the almost total absence of studies on feature reporting in the history of Quebec literature. She examines the gap between American literary journalism and French feature reporting practices. Analyzing the specificities of a corpus in counterpoint to a complex global canvas, her book sheds light on the reasons for this oversight, arguing that such fragility masks the very singularity of works at the intersection of culture and the disorder of the world.
This book explores the literary history of feature reporting before 1945, from Arthur Buies' train journeys to Gabrielle Roy's investigations in Western Canada, Jules Fournier's articles on Franco-Americans, and Eva Senécal's writing on log drivers. With this project, I hope to shed light on the emergence of field reporting practices in newspapers, practices about which little is yet known in Quebec and Canada.