In Religious Experience and the New Woman, Joanna Dean traces the development of liberal spirituality in the early 20th century through the life and work of Lily Dougall (1858--1923), a New Woman novelist who became known as a religious essayist and Anglican modernist. Dean examines the connections between Dougall's marginal position as a woman intellectual and her experiential, combatively iconoclastic theology, and demonstrates that through her writing and mentoring, Dougall contributed to the shaping of modern spirituality. Lily Dougall described religious experience -- the sense of the presence of God -- as the "rock" of her theology. Dean observes the protean nature of this rock as Dougall moved from a submissive holiness faith, to a mystical Mauricean sense of the Kingdom of God, to the relational theology of personal idealism, and reveals how psychology, which appeared to provide scientific support for her religious beliefs, eventually threatened to undermine her experiential faith.

Canadian Confederation has long been assessed as a political moment that created a new national entity. This book breaks new ground by arguing that Confederation was an imperial event that generated new questions and ideas about the future of global political order.

Imagination and the Creative Impulse in the New Literatures in Englishbrings together the proceedings of a symposium organised by the editors at the University of Trento in 1990. At a time when the study of the post-colonial literatures is gaining more widespread recognition, scholars based mainly at universities in Italy and Germany were invited to address the manner in which writers are giving literary expression to the complexity of contemporary post-colonial and multicultural societies and to consider, from their differing perspectives on the new literatures, central questions of formal experimentation, linguistic innovation, social and political commitment, textual theory and cross-culturality. Focusing on such major writers such as Achebe, Soyinka and Walcott, as well as on lesser-known figures such as Jack Davis, Witi Ihimaera, Rohinton Mistry and Manohar Malgonkar, the contributors take up many themes characteristic of the new literatures: the challenge posed to traditional authority, the expression of national identity, the role of literature in the liberation struggle, modes of literary practice in multicultural societies; the relationship of the new literatures in English to that of the former metropolitan centre; and the complex intertextuality characterizing much of the literary production of post-colonial societies.

As clerk of the House of Commons, Bourinot advised the speaker and other members of the house on parliamentary procedure; he also wrote the standard Canadian work on the subject. A founding member of the Royal Society of Canada, he played a leading role during the Society's first twenty years. Ahead of his time in writing intellectual history, Bourinot was also an early supporter of higher education for women. He was a man of contrasts, an early Canadian nationalist as well as an imperialist. In spite of the constitutional changes of 1982, there is still much in Bourinot's writing that is relevant today.

Through the last half of the nineteenth century, numbers of Canadians began to regard the West as a land of ideal opportuniy for large-scale agricultural settlement. This belief, in turn, led Canada to insist on ownership of the region and on immediate development. Underlying the expansionist movement was the assumption that the West was to be a hinterland to central Canada, both in its economic relationship and in its cultural development. But settlers who accepted the extravagant promises of expanionism found it increasingly difficult to reconcile the assumption of easstern dominance with their own perception of the needs of the West and of Canada. Doug Owram analyses the various phases of this development, examining in particular the writings - historical, scientific, journalistic, and promotional - that illuminate one of the most significant movements in the history of nineteenth-century Canada.