André Major, Jacques Godbout, Gaston Miron, and Michèle La-
londe, along with many others. If, however, the political themes
and related social concerns linked to Quebec nationalism can be
said to have impassioned a generation of francophone writers during
the 1960s and early 1970s, Quebec feminism has in turn touched off
an impressive array of creative efforts by women writers, the effects
of which are still being played out in the direction of women's
writing today.

Since 1970, a generation of self-consciously feminist writers has
emerged whose political perspectives and experimental approaches
to the practice of writing have dramatically changed the course of
contemporary Quebec letters. The literary contributions of Nicole
Brossard, Madeleine Gagnon, Louky Bersianik, and France Théoret
have ushered in a new era of textual experimentation and feminist
theorizing on women's writing. Although surprisingly diverse, the
works of these four women writers have added considerable depth
theoretical to the collective efforts of a growing number of Quebec
women writers for whom the political concerns of contemporary
feminism, the experimental forms of literary modernity, and the
question of the specificity or difference of women's writing appear
to be inextricably bound. Thus, while the primary focus of this book
is on the literary projects of four important Quebec women writers,
the theoretical assumptions, political issues and cultural perspectives
found in their radical attempts to inscribe the feminine have, I believe,
a much broader appeal.

The frames of reference of feminist thought and the experimental
nature of the feminine in writing in Quebec have been internation-
ally as well as regionally inspired. Taken as a whole, the various
and at times conflicting attempts by contemporary Quebec women
writers to voice the difference of women's experience in writing are
firmly grounded in recent feminist analyses of the unequal power
relations in patriarchal cultures; in the related political debates of
the left on racism, imperialism, and nationalism; and in a number
of the important political and philosophical discourses of our time--
Marxism, psychoanalysis, and deconstruction in particular. Indeed,
Quebec feminism and the experimental forms of women's writing
which have developed more or less concurrently since 1970 have

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