Le mythe forestier: arbres de mort et arbres de vie

Abstract

This article is a study of the forest as a privileged narrative space in Canadian children's literature, written in English and in French. The corpus of books reviewed here reveals that French Canadian story books about the forest tend to originate in the great European tradition of fables and medieval books of marvels. In English Canada, the bush is deeply rooted in the so-called native tradition in which nature, violence and death play a significant role. The nativeness of the bush is, however, an ideological illusion.