The sixteenth-century world and Jacques Cartier -- Forgetting and remembering -- The invention of a hero --Cartiermania -- Common sense -- The many meanings of Jacques Cartier -- Decline and dispersal -- Failure and forgetting
Summary
"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."--Jacket
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (pages 216-231) and index
