One of Canada's major twentieth-century writers, Anne Hébert has followed a markedly original path in her work. The author of two of the masterpieces of modern Canadian writing, the cycle of po...
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Critical Essay by John Watt Lennox
[In "Le Torrent" Anne Hébert deals with a protagonist who is] seeking the joy or freedom which … is, at the same time, apart from and pa...
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Critical Essay by Peter France
[Like much of québécois fiction "Le Torrent"] shows the distorting effect of a strict religious upbringing, in this case the stunting of the...
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Critical Essay by David Walker
[Perhaps] no other Quebecois poet has so successfully presented the long night of the French-Canadian soul as it seeks to exorcise its demons and escape from the small ...
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Critical Essay by Joyce Carol Oates
In "Children of the Black Sabbath" [Anne Hébert] poses the timely question of whether a beautiful young girl from an impoverished rural commun...
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Critical Essay by Paul G. Socken
[Children of the Black Sabbath is], simultaneously, the most traditional and the most unique [novel] on the Quebec literary scene…. Anne Hébert makes th...
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Critical Essay by Patricia Purcell [later Patricia Smart]
The writing of Anne Hébert records an intense interior drama of poetic and spiritual evolution, though in volume her poetic output has...
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Critical Essay by Joyce Carol Oates
In "Children of the Black Sabbath" [Anne Hébert] poses the timely question of whether a beautiful young girl from an impoverished rural commun...
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Critical Essay by Paul G. Socken
[Children of the Black Sabbath] is a forceful tale of personal and social anguish. It is the story of Sister Julie of the Trinity, born of parents who practise quasi-...
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Critical Essay by Paula Gilbert Lewis
Héloise is a modern-day recounting of the Abélard (here as Bernard) and Héloise legend, with Bernard's wife, Christine, representing ...
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Critical Essay by John Weightman
[Les Fous de Bassan] applies the term for a sea-bird (fou = gannet) to the half-crazed remnants of a Puritan community living on the eastern sea-board. Since they cam...
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Critical Essay by Samuel Moon
[The Tomb of the Kings] is a book closely unified by its constant introspection, by its atmosphere of profound melancholy, by its recurrent themes of a dead childhood, a...
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Critical Essay by F. M. Macri
Anne Hébert's story, Le Torrent, and its relation to the rest of French-Canadian literature takes on the same significance as does the relation between an ...
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Critical Essay by Anthony Raspa
[The reader] of Anne Hébert's The Silent Rooms (Les Chambres de Bois) will find that it is a novel about the choice between human normalcy and one kind o...
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Critical Essay by David Walker
[Traditional Quebecois] rejection of the real world as well as of the pleasures (sinful) of the present and of the body resulted in a collective malaise that is express...
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Critical Essay by Kathy Mezei
[In Les Enfants du Sabbat we] encounter the archetypal Quebec literary experience; a precocious adolescent becomes the battleground between the commands of the spirit an...
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Critical Essay by Margot Northey
Kamouraska is especially suited to begin an analysis of twentieth-century gothic fiction in Canada, since in form and content it provides the reader with a double per...
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Critical Essay by Kathy Mezei
In Les Chambres de bois, Anne Hébert tells a simple story with few characters, little action, an uncomplicated plot….
Anne Hébert's langua...
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Anne Hebert
Critical Essay by John Watt Lennox
