Moving Beyond Revisionism

Abstract

Since the 1970s, historians studying Quebec have traditionally taken a revisionist approach to writing about Quebec’s history. In the 1990s, a shift occurred and postrevisionism became the vanguard methodological approach. Quebec’s print media industry, meanwhile, had been ignored by revisionists because it did not support the revisionist thesis. This paper will use a post-revisionist perspective to demonstrate the limitations of the revisionist approach by analyzing how the print media in Quebec modernized. The paper will begin by chronicling the historiographical approaches of Quebec history and identify key literature in Canadian media history. There follows a brief history of the Canadian media industry and early 20th century Quebec history. Finally, the work of a group of reformers who laid the foundation to the modern print media industry in Quebec is examined.