Canadian Children's Regional Literature: Fictions First

Abstract

Résumé: Les conceptions traditionelles de l'identité canadienne qui président à notre lecture des textes littéraires influent également sur notre perception des particularismes de la littérature pour la jeunesse dite régionale. À partir de six albums illustrés, dont trois proviennent des Prairies et trois du Québec, l'auteur s'attache à démontrer que les appellations "cannadienne" et "régionale" sont des catégories importantes mais secondaires dans l'appréciation de ces ouvrages. La critique canadienne a tendace à surévaluer ces caractéristiques secondaires au détriment des qualités explicitement et spécifiquement littéraires de ces textes. Summary: The traditional conceptions, recently contested, of Canadian identity that affects the ways we read literary texts in general also affect our reading of Canadian children's regional literature. This article considers six picture books, three by Prairie writers and three from Quebec, in order to make the point that both Canadian and "regional" categories should be understood as helpful markers that are secondary to the primary qualities of the six books as fictions (while regional might be more useful term in postcolonial discussions than it was when it was simply opposed to "nation"). Prairie writing and writing from Quebec can indeed be distinguished by secondary characteristics, but in Canadian criticism we have tended to overvalue these kinds of secondary characteristics and either undervalue, or pay less attention to, the more explicitly and specifically literary qualities of these and other texts.