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THE CANADIAN FANTASTIC FINDS ITS ROOTS IN A NUMBER OF INDIGENOUS and immigrant oral traditions; an early manifestation of the literary fantastic in Canada appears in the loup-garou tales of Louis Fréchette, Honoré Beaugrand, and Pamphile Le May, and others, published at the end of the nineteenth and very beginning of the twentieth centuries. In contrast with the civility of the werewolfs French counterpart typified by Marie de France's late twelfthcentury "Le Lai de Bisclavret," the French-Canadian loup-garou was a malevolent, destructive creature who could nonetheless be "cured"-converted back to full humanity-with surprising ease. Like its French literary precursor, the French-Canadian loup-garou evolved from an oral tradition of folktales; it also engaged central questions of civility versus barbarism, as well as sexuality and gender relations. Yet the French-Canadian werewolf developed in a completely new setting: that of colonizing a new world, including interacting with what Old World discourses termed "savage" peoples and their lore about the territory now being explored and inhabited by European newcomers.
In this "Middle Ground" (White) of the backwoods, fur traders and trappers (voyageurs and coureurs des bois), clearers and settlers (défricheurs and habitants) and lumbermen developed lore which adapted stories brought across the Atlantic from France to the New World setting, sometimes infusing them with aspects of indigenous knowledge and stories. The lore of these new arrivals and their descendants, already viewed as "anciens Canadiens" in the period of modernization occurring in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was in turn exploited by writers like Fréchette, Beaugrand and Le May who revived these oral traditions in their ongoing construction of a FrenchCanadian national culture and identity, sometimes appropriating them in the service of quite different ideological aims.
In his path breaking doctoral dissertation, published as En quête du roman gothique québécois (1837-1860) (In Quest of the Québec Gothic Novel, 1985), Michel Lord helps inaugurate the study of the literary fantastic in Quebec. He outlines a tri-fold set oí goals for any endeavor in the developing field of Québec literary studies:
1. to find out if the works in question can be linked to any particular tradition and to discuss what that tradition is (9) ;
2. to determine those works' specific qualities and originality (9), and;
3. to ask...