Regards sur les archives d’écrivains francophones au Canada

Engaging with a writer’s archives – their notebooks, personal journals, correspondence, drafts, and annotations – when analyzing their canonical work, enables us to shed a different kind of light on the latter, to penetrate a hitherto inaccessible meaning. Although some significant initiatives have emerged in Canada over the past two decades, the Francophone aspect of writers’ archives has remained relatively untouched by researchers, especially with regard to the corpus outside Quebec. This work provides insight into the present state of research into several archival collections and of studies into different unique collections comprising drafts and other documents that are part of genetic records of published works. While the studies on the Quebec corpus (Roy, Guèvremont, Hébert, Ducharme, Aquin, Tremblay, etc.) are more numerous, those on Ontario (Poliquin), Manitoba (Léveillé) and Acadia (Leblanc) are also represented. The various collaborations emphasize the range of possible approaches towards working with archives – including genetic, thematic, semiotic, historical, sociological, and diaristic – while highlighting the diversity and richness of different collections as well as their inherent problems and gaps. A copublication with the Centre de recherche en civilisation canadienne-française. Published in French.