| Summary: | This Master's thesis is centered on the enchanted violin and its role in six literary tales from nineteenth century Quebec. The motif is traced throughout its history and its developments in various Indo-European contexts. The importance of the enchanted violin in the oral traditions of Europe and French-Canada is underlined. The motif's literary transformation in the nineteenth century is also analyzed; authors of the tales studied were chiefly concerned with the creation of a national literature, and this affected their portrayal of the enchanted violin in several ways. Vladimir Propp's structuralist morphology is used in order to define the function of the violin as a magic object in each of the works. Lastly, a mytho-critical reading of the six tales concentrates on the symbolic power of the instrument and speculates as to its ethnographic origins.
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