The hero and the historians

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Alan Gordon

"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, passed on through the generations, and used to present particular ideas about the world in English- and French-speaking Canada. He reveals that the cult of celebrity surrounding Cartier by the mid-nineteenth century reflected a particular understanding of history, one which accompanied the arrival of modernity in North America. This new sensibility shaped the political and cultural currents of nation building in Canada. Cartier was a point of contact between English and French Canadian nationalism, but the nature of that contact had profound limitations."--BOOK JACKET.

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Christopher M. Jones

This study concentrates on the importance of American influences on Vian's extensive jazz activities and his mock translations of American noir novels under the name Vernon Sullivan. Vian personally embodied the increasingly transatlantic nature of Western culture and the melding of elite and popular forms of expression. The diverse components of this synthesis shed light on the construction of both individual and national identity in postwar France.

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Gilles Perrault

L'histoire d'un village de huit cents âmes accroché à la hanche droite du Cotentin : Sainte-Marie-du-Mont. Gilles Perrault, qui s'y est installé en 1961, retrace, grâce aux archives paroissiales, ce microcosme de l'histoire de France marqué par deux débarquements : celui de son fondateur, le viking Vieul Aux Epaules, en 900 et celui des Alliés en 1944 sur la plage qu'ils baptisèrent Utah-Beach.

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Émile Zola

Aristide Rougon, known as Saccard, is a failed property speculator determined to make his way once more in Paris. Unscrupulous, seductive, and with unbounded ambition, he schemes and manipulates his way to power. Financial undertakings in the Middle East lead to the establishment of a powerful new bank and speculation on the stock market; Saccard meanwhile conducts his love life as energetically as he does his business, and his empire is seemingly unstoppable. Saccard, last encountered in The Kill (La Curée) in Zola's Rougon-Macquart series, is a complex figure whose story intricately intertwines the worlds of politics, finance, and the press. The repercussions of his dealings on all levels of society resonate disturbingly with the financial scandals of more recent times. This is the first new translation for more than a hundred years, and the first unabridged translation in English. The edition includes a wide-ranging introduction and useful historical notes. - Back cover.