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Combat journal for Place d'Armes: A personal narrative
Combat journal for Place d'Armes A personal narrative Author:Scott Symons Originally published in 1967, Place d'Armes, set in Montreal, was initially met with shock and anger by most reviewers. As D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover once had, it challenged the attitudes and morals held by most people in its time regarding life and literature. Despite this initial reaction, the novel earned author Scott Sy... more »mons the Beta Sigma Phi Best First Canadian Novel Award and went on to be regarded as one of the "most important statements about Canadian imaginative life in the 1960s." Both a study of the emergence of a character's true self through his homosexual experiences and the decay of Canadian, and especially French-Canadian, traditions, Place d'Armes was named one of the top 100 most important books in Canadian history. Peter Buitenhuis, the late author and former head of Simon Fraser University's English department, has written that Symons's novel is "a defiant assault on the Canadian bourgeois mentality" that "celebrates human sexuality and spirituality with all the gusto that language can command."« less