Between the New Country and the Old World: William Chapman and French-Canadian Literary Nationalism

Poet and provocateur William Chapman (1850–1917) wrote patriotic verse recounting the history of New France, envisioning a glorious future for its descendants. Despite his many literary achievements – he was a two-time laureate of the Académie française and a nominee for the Nobel Prize in Literature – Chapman is more often remembered for his explosive feud with Louis Fréchette, a rivalry that pitted the two national poets against one another and played out in vicious invective across the pages of Quebec newspapers. Chapman’s lifelong quest to glorify French Canada and accumulate literary prestige in North America and Europe positioned him squarely between the new country and the old world. Over the course of his forty-year career, Chapman published five collections of poetry – Les Québecquoises (1876), Les Feuilles d’érable (1890), Les Aspirations (1904), Les Rayons du Nord (1909), and Les Fleurs de givre (1912) – whose very titles underscore his devotion to French-Canadian identity, as well as his literary ambition. Integrating close readings of Chapman’s verse with archival material related to his writing life, Erin Edgington revisits his full oeuvre on its own terms and in context, discerning the particular ways Chapman expressed the ideas of literary value and national literature that motivated him from a young age, from juvenilia like Les Mines d’or de la Beauce (1881) to his polemical essays and his unfinished magnum opus, L’Épopée canadienne. Between the New Country and the Old World challenges the prevailing narrative that has labelled Chapman a second-rate, forgettable poet, showing how his life and work reveal important insights into literary fame, poetics in a transitional moment at the turn of the century, and the history of French literature in North America.