LibGuides: French Language, Literature, and Culture: French-Canadian Resources

French-Canadian Dictionaries

Dictionnaire Usito Usito fills the gaps of French dictionaries (designed by and for Europeans) by presenting a description of the world in which the North American Quebeckers and other francophone can identify culturally and linguistically. Designed entirely in Quebec, Usito is the first electronic dictionary to describe the standard French used in Quebec, while bridging with the rest of the Francophone community. It offers content over North America and the world. Usito is the only one to offer such a detailed description of the world that Quebecois and other French-speaking North Americans can relate to.

Le grand dictionnaire terminologique (GDT)

Le grand dictionnaire terminologique (GDT) "est une banque de fiches terminologiques rédigées par l'Office québécois de la langue française ou des partenaires de l'Office. Chaque fiche renseigne sur un concept lié à un domaine d'emploi spécialisé et présente les termes qui le désignent en français, en anglais et, parfois, dans d'autres langues."

French Canadian Libraries

Bibliothèque et archives nationales de Québec
Features a number of online resources including the Bibliographie du Québec. 1821-1967, online versions of Le Courier de Québec (1807-1808), La Gazette des Trois-Rivières (1817-1822), Le Libéral / The Liberal( 1837) and La Quotidienne (1837-1838); Gazette officielle du Québec (1869-1995); Relations France-Québec depuis 1760, accessible (in French only) and much more.
AMICUS: Canadian National Catalogue
AMICUS is a free catalogue listing the holdings of libraries across Canada. As a national catalogue, AMICUS not only shows the published materials held at Library and Archives Canada (LAC) but also those located in over 1300 libraries across Canada. AMICUS contains over 30 million records for books, magazines, newspapers, government documents, theses, sound recordings, maps, electronic texts as well as items in braille and large print.

Online Resources

France in America
"Conceived in partnership with France’s national library, the Bibliothèque nationale de France, France in America /France en Amérique is a bilingual digital library made available by the Library of Congress. It explores the history of the French presence in North America from the first decades of the 16th century to the end of the 19th century."

Useful Library Databases

ARTFL (American and French Research on the Treasury of the French Language)
The Project for American and French Research on the Treasury of the French Language (ARTFL) is a cooperative enterprise of Analyses et Traitements Informatiques du Lexique Fran?ais (ATILF) of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), the Division of the Humanities, the Division of the Social Sciences, and Electronic Text Services (ETS) of the University of Chicago. The ARTFL Project consists of many databases of full text French literature from the 12th to the 19th century.
Bibliography of Indigenous Peoples in North America
This resource covers a wide range of topics including archaeology, multicultural relations, gaming, governance, legend, and literacy.
Dates of coverage range from the sixteenth century to the present.

Canadian National Digital Heritage Index
The Canadian National Digital Heritage Index (CNDHI) is an index of digitized Canadian heritage collections located at Canadian universities and provincial and territorial libraries.
Héritage
Héritage is a database of unpublished material chronicling Canadian History from the 1600’s to the mid-1900’s. Like other Canadian.org collections, Héritage is made up of digitized historical documents from both governmental and private individuals.

L'ÎLE
This database provides information on French-Canadian writers and includes biographies, bibliographies, news accounts, book reviews and photographs.
North American Immigrant Letters, Diaries, and Oral Histories
North American Immigrant Letters, Diaries and Oral Histories includes 2,162 authors and approximately 100,000 pages of information, so providing a unique and personal view of what it meant to immigrate to America and Canada between 1800 and 1950.
Our Roots: Canada's local histories online
Our Roots/Nos Racines provides universal access via the World Wide Web to unique primary and secondary materials concerning the cultural and social heritage of Canada. Fulltext materials in French and English.

Selected Journals

The Canadian Modern Language Review / La revue canadienne des langues vivantes
The Canadian Modern Language Review publishes one guest-edited theme issue per year.

Érudit
Érudit's collection covers a wide range of disciplines within the human, social and natural sciences. Érudit is a point of dissemination of scholarly periodicals supported by le Fonds Québécois de Recherche sur la Société et la Culture. The search engine enables the user to consult the collection made up of recently published articles and retrospectively digitized texts from past issues.

Québec studies
Repere
Provides references to articles from French-language periodicals, covering all the major Canadian French-language titles (including the full text of some articles from about 40 periodicals from Quebec) as well as journals published in France, Belgium and Switzerland.
Studies in Canadian Literature
Studies in Canadian Literature/Études en littérature canadienne (SCL/ÉLC) is a biannual, bilingual, peer-reviewed journal devoted to the study of Canadian literature in English and French peer-reviewed. Online access is from 1995-2002. Current issues in Periodicals: Call number PS8001 S8.

Selected Books

A checklist of printed materials relating to French-Canadian literature, 1763-1968 = Liste de reference d'imprimes relatifs a la litterature canadienne-francaise by Gerard Tougas
Call Number: PS8073 B686
Publication Date: 1973
A primary bibliography of French-Canadian literature from the nineteenth century to 1968.