Ubcpress.ca :: University of British Columbia Press

search : contact us : about us : site guide : home

Search Our Catalogue

UBC Press

About UBC Press
Acknowledgements
Conferences & Events
Contact Us
Media Centre
Publishing With UBC Press
Publishers Represented
Staff Directory

Books

Awards
Catalogues
Forthcoming Titles
How To Order
Recent Reviews
Review Copies
Series

Join Our Mailing List

Sign Up
Privacy Statement

ubcpress.ca

About ubcpress.ca
Frequent Questions
Privacy Statement
Site Guide
Website Feedback

Featured Title

The Hero and the Historians

Historiography and the Uses of Jacques Cartier

Alan Gordon

$85.00 Hardcover
Release Date: 2/15/2010
ISBN: 9780774817417

$29.95 Paperback
Release Date: 7/1/2010
ISBN: 9780774817424

248 Pages

OTHER WAYS TO ORDER

About the Book

Historians have long engaged in passionate debate about collective memory and the building of national identities. Alan Gordon focuses on one national hero -- Jacques Cartier -- to explore how notions about the past have been created and passed on from generation to generation in English- and French-speaking Canada and used to present particular ideas about the world.

The Hero and the Historians traces the evolution of Cartier’s image -- from his exploration of the St. Lawrence in 1534 to the mid-twentieth century, when hero worship fell from favour among professional historians -- and ties it to changing notions of the past. Gordon reveals that nineteenth-century celebrations of Cartier reflected a particular understanding of history, one which accompanied the arrival of modernity in North America. This new sensibility, in turn, shaped the political and cultural currents of identity formation and nation building in Canada. Cartier was a point of contact between English and French Canadian nationalism, but, as Gordon shows, the nature of that contact had profound limitations.

This important work shows how changing notions of the past have shaped identity formation in English-speaking Canada and Quebec. It is necessary reading for anyone interested in the underlying culture of national identity -- and national unity -- in Canada.

About the Author(s)

Alan Gordon is an associate professor in the Department of History at the University of Guelph.

Table of Contents

Illustrations
Acknowledgments
A Note on Translations

Introduction
1 The Sixteenth-Century World and Jacques Cartier
2 Forgetting and Remembering
3 The Invention of a Hero
4 Cartiermania
5 Common Sense
6 The Many Meanings of Jacques Cartier
7 Decline and Dispersal
8 Failure and Forgetting

Notes
Bibliography
Index

Reviews

"Cartier is one of those rare heroes who have figured in both French- and English-speaking representations of the past. By showing the different ways this came about and the different purposes for which Cartier has been made to serve, this important and engaging book connects two historiographies within Canada as it speaks to issues of relevance to an international audience."
-- H.V. Nelles, L.R. Wilson Professor of Canadian History, McMaster University, and author of The Art of Nation-Building: Pageantry and Spectacle at Quebec's Tercentenary

Sample Chapter

Front Matter and Chapter One