Studies in 20th Century Literature Volume 9 Issue 1 Special Issue on Mikhail Bakhtin Article 9 9-1-1984 The Relevance of the Carnivalesque in the Québec Novel Maroussia Ahmed McMaster University Follow this and additional works at: https://newprairiepress.org/sttcl Part of the French and Francophone Literature Commons, Modern Literature Commons, and the Russian Literature Commons This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License. Recommended Citation Ahmed, Maroussia (1984) "The Relevance of the Carnivalesque in the Québec Novel," Studies in 20th Century Literature: Vol. 9: Iss. 1, Article 9. https://doi.org/10.4148/2334-4415.1155 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by New Prairie Press. It has been accepted for inclusion in Studies in 20th Century Literature by an authorized administrator of New Prairie Press. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. The Relevance of the Carnivalesque in the Québec Novel Abstract The Bakhtinian concept of space is topological rather than topographic, and encompasses the cosmic, the social and the corporeal; its function in the Québec novel consists in debasing the hierarchical verticality of Lent and of the "officialeast. f " As Carnival is an anti-law,"law" in the Québec novel will be defined as the chronotope of the sacred space (the land or "terre" of Québec) in the genre known as the "novel of the land" ("le roman de Ia terre"). Until the Second World War, this chronotope transforms an Augustinian political view of the civitas dei into literary proselytism, via the ideology of agricultural messianism.