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"Last Rites" 1960
From: The Quebec Anthology
$0.72
Bessette’s only book of short stories, La Garden-Party de Christophine, was published in 1980 and has never been completely translated. It contains stories from many periods in Bessette’s development as a writer. "L’extrêmeonction" first appeared as "The Conversion" in Queen’s Quarterly in 1960, translated by Glen Shortliffe; included here in a new translation by Wayne Grady as "Last Rites," it is a fine example of Bessette’s early blending of traditional style and avant-garde ideas. Bessette’s work hovers between
the writers of the 1950s and the literature of the Quiet Revolution, which, in his second book of criticism, published in 1968, Bessette called "une littérature en ébullition," a literature in ferment.
Contributors
Gérard Bessette
Gérard Bessette was born on February 25, 1920, in Sainte-Anne-de-Sabrevois, Quebec. He attended the Université de Montréal, receiving his master's degree in 1946 on the poems of Émile Nelligan, and a doctorate in 1950 on poetic imagery in Québécois poetry. From 1946 to 1948 he taught at the University of Saskatchewan, and from 1951 to 1958 at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, Ohio. He accepted a post at the Royal Military College in Kingston, Ontario, in 1958, and from 1960 until his retirement in 1980 he taught
