(DOWNLOAD) "Styles of Authorship in New France: Pierre Boucher, Settler and Pierre-Esprit Radisson, Explorer." by Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada " eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Styles of Authorship in New France: Pierre Boucher, Settler and Pierre-Esprit Radisson, Explorer.
- Author : Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada
- Release Date : January 22, 1999
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 234 KB
Description
This essay is a comparative case-study of the careers of two authors of New France, of the ways in which they envisioned themselves as authors, and of how they exploited (or failed to exploit) the options available to them for publication. Both men represent an important aspect of the earliest phase of Canada's book history, since for reasons made clear below, though they wrote in or about the new land, their writings were first circulated (if that is the right word) abroad. The two, who had almost certainly been acquainted with each other in Trois-Rivieres, forma sharp contrast. Pierre Boucher (1622-1717) is the archetypal settler figure: soldier, judge, governor of Trois-Rivieres, Sieur de Boucherville and founder of the town of that name. Pierre-Esprit Radisson (ca. 1640-1710) is the archetypal coureur-de-bois. His name, an icon of the adventurous spirit, today provides the toponym for one of Quebec's most remote areas, `La Radissonie,' as well as the familiar American hotels(2). As this comparison suggests, at every point the lives of Boucher and Radisson provide instructive counter-examples to each other, and this is no less true of their lives as authors. In Boucher's case, that began in 1664; in Radisson's, not until 1885, and the reasons why provide useful insight into at least one historical situation they shared: the lire of a writer at the intersection between two media of communication, a scribal one slowly dying out, its print successor already in thriving youth. What were their concepts of authorship? Within what `field' of book culture (to invoke Bourdieu(3)) did they consciously or unconsciously operate? And within this field, what were their chosen (I use the word cautiously) modes of publication? An unusual aspect of the book culture of Canada which is their setting is the belated inception of printing in the early colonies of Canada and Acadia. It was not until 1751 that Bartholomew Green, a printer trained in Boston, set up a press in Halifax, Nova Scotia,(4) and in Quebec the first printing shop was established in 1764 by two printers from Philadelphia, William Brown and Thomas Gilmore. H. Pearson Gundy has attributed the absence of a printing-press under the pre-conquest French regime to bureaucratic parsimony in Paris,(5) but the actual situation may have been more complex, as the travelling Swedish-Finnish botanist Pehr Kalm recognized in the early 1750s: