Books published by University of Toronto Press

One answer to unemployment is to spread available opportunities among more people. This book examines the advantages and disadvantages for labour, management, and government of two related types of innovative work arrangements: worksharing - the shortening of the work week to prevent layoffs; and jobsharing - the conversion of full-time jobs into permanent part-time positions to suit changing employee preferences.The effect of such a plan is studied in relation to costs to the government, unemployment rates, work incentives, and employer's labour costs. The impact on junior and senior employees, and on the union, is also considered. In relation to jobsharing, the authors predict a continuing increase in the number of persons preferring permanent part-time employment. This comes from the rising number of multiple-earner families, changing values about male and female roles in the labour force, and the desire for a more flexible and gradual approach to retirement. The authors conclude with recommendation for policy changes to encourage worksharing and accommodate jobsharing.

The reconnaissances of this book are ventures in the deep analysis of the unconscious as testified to by world ethnography. The topics examined are the image of the half-man, the operation of analogical classification, and ideas about sovereign powers to which men conceive themselves as subject. In each case, analysis brings out remarkable uniformities on a global scale. These cultural similarities are not correlated with particular social forms or linguistic traditions, and in their characteristics features they are not the products of deliberate cogitation or creative invention. The formal attributes they share are that they are premised on binary opposition and symmetry. The argument is that, intrinsically, the social facts in question are spontaneous products of unconscious 'cerebrational vectors,' and that they are archetypes of human experience.The three studies included in the volume, originally delivered as lectures at the University of Toronto in 1978, form an important sequel to Needham's previous book, Primordial Characters, and further develop certain of its analytical themes and substantive issues.

In 1821, British Columbia was the exclusive domain of an independent Native population and the Hudson's Bay Company. By te time it entered Confederation some fifty years later, a British colonial government was firmly in place. In this book Tina Loo recounts the shaping of the new regime.The history of pre-Confederation British Columbia is rich in lore and tales of adventure surrounding the fur trade, conflict between settlers and the Hudson's Bay Company, and, above all, the gold rush. Loo takes the familiar themes as a starting-point for fresh investigation. Her inquiry moves from the disciplinary practices of the Hudson's Bay Company, through the establishment of cuorts in the gold fields, to conflicts over the rule of juries and the nature of property. By detailing specific incidents and then drawing from a wife historical field to sketch in new background, she hs revised established hsitory. Loo structures her analysis of events around the discourse of laissez-faire liberalism and shows how this discourse styled the law and order of the period. She writes with wit and elegance, bringing life to even the most technical aspects of her investigation. This is the first comprehensive legal history of British Columbia before Confederation.

In this memoir Kay Macpherson, the respected feminist, pacifist, and political activist, takes a delightful look back at a rich and fascinating life, dedicated to the principles of women's rights and social justice, and to an unshakeable conviction that women working together can change the world, and have a marvellous time in the process. Born in Englad in 1913, Macpherson immigrated to Canada in 1935. Nine years later she married C.B. Macpherson, then in the early years of his distinguished career as a political philosopher, and together they raised three children. In the late 1940s, a busy mother and academic wife, Macpherson joined the Association of Women Electors. Eventually she served as its national president, an office she held also with the Voice of Women and later with the National Action Committee on the Status of Women. She ran several times as a federal candidate for the NDP. She travelled the world as an advocate of women's rights, and spent most of her time in Canada in the consuming work of social change: organizing, demonstrating, writing letters, giving speeches, and, above all, meeting. From their meetings Macpherson and her colleagues moved into the streets, into Parliament, and, eventually, into history, witho ne of the most important achievements for Canadian women int he twentieth century: the celebrated equality clause in the Constitution of 1982.Macpherson's story is the story of second-wave feminism in Canada, which cut across party, class, and language lines, and was characterized by a tremendous sense of unity and of hope. It is also a candid account of family stresses, including strained relations with her children, the death of her husband in 1987, and that of her son two years later. Kay Macpherson remains unshaken in her commitment to the grass-roots action. On receiving the Order of Canada in 1982, she was asked by the Governor General what she had been up to lately. 'Revolution,' she replied.

From behind the close doors of Meech Lake comes this insider's account of the negotiations that put Canada's future on the line. Patrick J. Monahan was there throughout the negotiations that began in the fall of 1986 and culminated in the week-long meeting of First Ministers in June 1990, after which the accord failed to be ratified. He tells a compelling story of deals and dealmakers, compromise and confrontation. Many in English Canada believe that at Meech Lake the federal government sold out to the provinces, especially to Quebec, and that by conducting negotiations behind closed doors the government acted illegitimately. Not so, says Monahan. Far from being a sell-out, Meech represented a reasonable compromise between competing positions. Going back to the initial position put forward by the Bourassa government in 1986 he shows how that position was modified in the course of the negotiations. And closed doors, he argues, were essential in ensuring effective bargaining. There could have been no agreement without them. Now, in the middle of 1991, Canada is once again negotiating its future existence. There are vital lessons to be learned from the Meech Lake round; Monahan articulates some of those lessons, and indicates how they ought to figure in the current process. Canadians, he argues, ignore them at their country's peril.

Certain regions of Canada suffer chronically from social and economic underdevelopment. Economists, geographers, and sociologists have written voluminously about the problem; politicians and policy-makers have mounted grand schemes in a vain effort to rectify imbalances; and planners have created and implemented programs in order to satisfy political exigencies, vested power elites, or the discontent of the Canadian citizens who inhabit these regions. Matthews, in a lucid, systematic analysis of regionalism and regional underdevelopment in Canada (particularly Atlantic Canada), takes us through the academic cant, political puffery, and bureaucratic bumbling to show how regional disparity and regional underdevelopment are the result of exploitation by powerful central Canadian interests - often acting in concert with and aided by the federal government, and too often armed with theoretical models and justifications designed by 'establishment' economists to legitimate their self-interests.He provides a devastating critique of the neo-classical economic and other models that have been created to analyse regional disparities, and in their place champions an approach that rejects economic determinism and structural determinism. He maintains that individuals bring about change and development and individuals, he asserts, are capable of acting in the general interest and not simply out of class interest.The Creation of Regional Dependency makes a landmark contribution to our understanding of the causes of regional dependency in this country and original contribution to the study of Canadian society.

The only existing similar bibliography was published in 1930. The tremendous developments in the fields of research and publishing in Canada during the past thirty years have made it very desirable that a new bibliography should be prepared. The Bibliographical Society of Canada formed a committee of members to collect information on bibliographies of local interest or "e;in progress,"e; and the Society has sponsored the publication. Library schools in Canada supplied lists of works prepared by their students. The staff of the National Library has assisted in the compilation. The Bibliography is planned to be of use to readers of either English or French. It covers such topics as general bibliographies; current bibliographies; collective bibliographies; author bibliographies; newspapers; manuscripts; temperance; religion; sociology and folklore; politics; law ; education; commerce; linguistics; sciences; anthropology; biology; botany; zoology; agriculture; technology; fine arts; numismatics; music; literature; geography; geography; history. There are very complete indexes to compilers, subjects and authors.

This study is in response to a growth of public interest in the size and structure of education facilities and their relation to economic and social policy. It determines the scope of educational services, both public and private, and traces the sources of educational finance through the various spending agencies and allocators of finance back to the eventual suppliers of funds. With detailed analysis based on careful observation, the study provides a wealth of statistical information on this neglected aspect of education.

The first women's suffrage society in Britain was formed in 1867, following the temporary Committee of the previous year. This book appears appropriately in the centenary year. That women should vote is now so generally accepted that few of the post-war generation can appreciate the long and intense struggle before women's right to political equality was recognized. John Stuart Mill presented his Women Suffrage Petition to the House of Commons in 1866. It took Parliament fifty-two years to enfranchise the first women.Dr. Rover, using much original research, discusses the interaction between the political parties and the two movements for women's suffrage, constitutional and militant. The analysis of the attitude of the party leaders towards women's enfranchisement illuminates the characters of the prime ministers of the period and emphasises the difficulties inherent in our parliamentary procedure.

Beyond the Provinces takes stock of Canada's literary scene at the end of the twentieth century, revealing the astonishing developments that have occurred in the country's literary culture in the past decades and affirming the maturity of literary Canada.In the opening chapter David Staines examines the colonial mentality that pervaded turn-of-the-century literature, was later challenged, and has all but disappeared at century's end. In the second chapter he explores the unique Canadian presence in American fiction in order to examine the way in which Canada found its literary independence from the United States. And in the final chapter he proposes that Canadian literary selfhood has been complemented by a still tentative but distinctive critical voice.(F.E.L. Priestley Memorial Lectures in the History of Ideas)

The first of three volumes of the Official History of the Royal Canadian Air Force, this book provides the definitive story of Canadian airmen in World War I and, moreover, a revisionist account of the war in the air. Organized topically, this volume begins with an overview of military aviation in Canada prior to 1914, as successful aircraft experiments like Baldwin's and McCurdy's Silver Dart are set against Defence Minister Sam Hughes' rejection of any government air policy. Financial timidity and political uncertainty subsequently decreed that the 20,000 Canadians who trained for, or fought in, history's first air war would have no air force of their own but would fly in the British flying services.The sections which follow show that Canadians excelled in every aspect of the air war. Indeed, although the First World War never saw an exclusively Canadian squadron in action and no Canadian rose to a command above Group level, Professor Wise has been able to write a full account of the war in the air from the Canadian perspective. Recruitment and training, the maritime air war, the strategic bombing of Germany and the defence of Great Britain, as well as action on the Western Front, in Italy, and in Macedonia, are all covered in depth. Each section reveals the complexity of air operations, as tactics, strategy, and aircraft evolved with astonishing speed. The exploits of remarkable fighter aces such as Billy Bishop, Raymond Collishaw, D.R. MaccLaren, and W.G. Barker, and of bomber leaders like R.H. Mulock, are set in the context of the air war and the many thousands of Canadians who served with them.In his conclusion Wise traces the development of Canadian government air policy to the year 1920, during which time the first Canadian air force was born and quickly died. In analysing this major step in Canada's entry into the air age he lays the foundation for postwar civil expansion and the formation of the RCAF.Illustrated with specially prepared colour and sketch maps and over 200 photographs, many of them published here for the first time, this book should prove invaluable to the military historian and of wide appeal to the aviation enthusiast and general reader alike.The other volumes in the Official History of the Royal Canadian Air Force are The Creation of a National Air Force by W.A.B. Douglas (out of print) and The Crucible of War, 1939-1945 by Brereton Greenhous, et al. (available).

The family has become a subject of increasing scrutiny in recent years, giving special relevance to this work by the late Michael Sheehan. Collected here for the first time, Sheehan's papers contain the fruits of a forty-year-long career of archival research and interpretation of documents on property, marriage, family, sexuality, and law in medieval Europe. Marked by an early orientation and developing focus on the status of women in the Middle Ages, the work of Michael Sheehan displays a unique tapestry of the social and legal realities of medieval marriages and family life.Sheehan's research focused on the parallel study and interpretation of Church law and cases drawn from ecclesiastical court registers. By analysing the emergence of the last will as a legal and social document, he brought a new interpretation to the definition and codification of Christian marriage and the family and how these institutions functioned in society. Although his approach was largely by way of canon law, he was invariably at pins to incorporate solid support from such related fields as theology, the social and popular history of religion, and the history of sexuality and sexual behaviour. As a result, these essays throw light on many social realities in medieval Europe and illustrate the development of a methodology for others to follow.

This unique volume of thirty essays, by fifty-three internationally known scholars, honours C.S. (Rufus) Churcher, the distinguished Canadian palaeontologist. The papers focus on late Cenozoic mammals in North America and Africa and provide both site-specific descriptions of faunas and their associated geological contexts, and more general syntheses of regional palaeoenvironments and biogeography. The volume provides a much-needed overview of current research.The stature of the researchers who have contributed to the volume, and the breadth of the material presented, is a reflection of Churcher's diverse research interests. The first section contains eleven papers on the palaeoenvironment and palaeoecology of Quaternary mammals in North America; the second section has 9 contributions describing faunas and morphological analyses of North American Quaternary mammals; and the final section contains nine papers on the palaeoecology and palaeoenvironments of late Cenozoic mammals of Africa. In this final section, Alan Gentry pays tribute to Churcher by naming a species after him: Budorcas churcheri. The volume contains individual discussions of North American fossil prairie dogs, mastodons, zebras, short-faced bears, sabre cats, lions, giant armadillos, elk-moose, caribou and muskrats, as well as African hyaenas, zebras, hipparion horses, antelopes, rodents, and giraffes.

During the Renaissance, the most renowned model of epic poetry was Virgil's Aeneid, a poem promoting an influential concept of heroism based on the commitment to one's nation and gods. However, Longinus' theory of the sublime - newly recovered during the Renaissance - contradicted this absolute devotion to nation as a marker of religious piety. Heroic Awe explores how Renaissance epic poetry used the sublime to challenge the assumption that epic heroism was primarily about civic duty and glorification of state.The book demonstrates how the significant investment of Renaissance epic poetry in Longinus' theory of the sublime reshaped the genre of epic. To do so, Kelly Lehtonen examines the intersection between the Longinian sublime and early modern Protestant and Catholic discourses in Renaissance poems such as the Gerusalemme Liberata, Les Semaines, The Faerie Queene, and Paradise Lost. In illuminating the role of Longinus along with that of religious discourses, Heroic Awe offers a new perspective on epic heroism in Renaissance epic poetry, redefining heroism as the capacity to be overwhelmed emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually by encounters with divine glory. In considering the links between religion, the sublime, and epic, the book aims to shed new light on several core topics in early modern studies, including epic heroism, Renaissance philosophy, theories of emotion, and the psychology of religion.

In 1971, priest, theologian, and philosopher Ivan Illich wrote Deschooling Society, a plea to liberate education from schooling and to separate schooling from the state. On the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of its publication, Ivan Illich Fifty Years Later looks at the theological roots of Illich's thought and the intellectual and ideological strands that contributed to his ideas.Guided by the central question of how Illich reached the point of writing Deschooling Society, the book sheds light on how Illich produced a critique of schooling that can be defined by its eclecticism. Bruno-Jofr and Igelmo Zaldvar explore how this controversial book was framed by Illich's early neo-scholastic and anti-modern foundation, his discovery of St. Thomas through Jacques Maritain, and the existential turning points that influenced his public life and intellectual direction in moving from a critique of the Church as institution to a critique of schooling. Drawing from the interpretative theories of Quentin Skinner, Reinhart Koselleck, and William H. Sewell and from concepts such as educationalization, transnationality, and configuration, among other heuristic tools, the authors provide an original and cross-disciplinary analysis of Deschooling Society and its place in Illich's journey.

In nineteenth-century England, legal conceptions of work and family changed in fundamental ways. Notably, significant legal moves came into play that changed the legal understanding of the family.Constructing the Family examines the evolution of the legal-discursive framework governing work and family relations. Luke Taylor considers the intersecting intellectual and institutional forces that contributed to the dissolution of the household, the establishment of separate spheres of work and family, and the emergence of modern legal and social ideas concerning work and family. He shows how specific legal-institutional moves contributed to the creation of the family's categorical status in the social and legal order and a distinct and exceptional body of rules - Family Law - for its governance.Shedding light on the historical processes that contributed to the emergence of English Family Law, Constructing the Family shows how work and family became separate regulatory domains, and in so doing reveals the contingent nature of the modern legal family.

This directory is an indispensable resource book for the insurance industry, published yearly to facilitate the forwarding of insurance claims throughout Canada and the United States. Its subscribers are adjusters, firms specializing in counsel to the insurance industry, insurance companies, and industrial and government offices.Listed are more than 450 independent adjusting offices, insurance counsel, restoration services, and others involved in insurance-related industries. The arrangement of listings is national, geographical, and alphabetical: adjusters and counsel are listed by city, within province or state, and country. The editorial section includes a list of associations of insurance adjusters for Ontario, Quebec, Canada, and the United States, as well as Provincial Superintendents of Insurance, the Fire Marshals of Canada, and a comprehensive listing of Canadian insurance companies. These listings are interspersed with informative advertisements from all fields of the insurance industry. Also included are indexes to adjusters, insurance counsel, insurance-related industries, and advertisers.

Local government plays a critical role in the lives of all citizens, from remote towns to capital cities. As the political legitimacy and importance of municipalities grow, however, it becomes increasingly difficult to strike a balance between local and higher levels of government. The contributors to Local Government in a Global World provide insights into key themes impacting local governance in two federations with much in common historically, culturally, and politically: Australia and Canada.These essays examine changes in the Australian and Canadian systems through four thematic lenses: citizen participation in government systems, the restructuring and reform of local governments, the use of performance measures and management systems in the administration of local governments, and the relations of local governments within higher levels of governments. Unique in its thematic selection and in its compare-and-contrast structure, Local Government in a Global World provides a valuable reference for those seeking to understand how effective local government is structured and managed.

Giulia Bigolina's (ca. 1516-ca. 1569) Urania (ca. 1552) is the oldest known prose romance to have been written by an Italian woman. In Kissing the Wild Woman, Christopher Nissen explores the unique aesthetic vision and innovative narrative features of Bigolina's greatest surviving work, in which she fashioned a new type of narrative that combined elements of the romance and the novella and included a polemical treatise on the moral implications of portraiture and the role of women in the arts. Demonstrating that Bigolina challenged cultural authority by rejecting the prevailing views of both painting and literature, Nissen discusses Bigolina's suggestion that painting constituted an ineffectual, even immoral mode of self-promotion for women in relation to the views of the contemporary writer Pietro Aretino and the painter Titian. Kissing the Wild Woman's analysis of this little-known work adds a new dimension to the study of Renaissance aesthetics in relation to art history, Renaissance thought, women's studies, and Italian literature.

At several junctures in his career, Dante paused to consider what it meant to be a writer. The questions he posed were both simple and wide-ranging: How does language, in particular 'poetic language,' work? Can poetry be translated? What is the relationship between a text and its commentary? Who controls the meaning of a literary work? In Dante and Augustine, Simone Marchesi re-examines these questions in light of the influence that Augustine's reflections on similar issues exerted on Dante's sense of his task as a poet.Examining Dante's life-long dialogue with Augustine from a new point of view, Marchesi goes beyond traditional inquiries to engage more technical questions relating to Dante's evolving ideas on how language, poetry, and interpretation should work. In this engaging literary analysis, Dante emerges as a versatile thinker, committed to a radical defence of poetry and yet always ready to rethink, revise, and rewrite his own positions on matters of linguistics, poetics, and hermeneutics.

International law is a fundamentally modern phenomenon. Tracing its roots to nineteenth-century pronouncements on the 'law of nations,' the discipline took shape in the elaborate treaty structures of the post-First World War era and in the institutions and tribunals established after the Second World War. International law as scholars know and study it today is a product of modernism.In The Aesthetics of International Law, Ed Morgan engages in a literary parsing of international legal texts. In order to demonstrate how these types of legal narratives are imbued with modernist aesthetics, Morgan juxtaposes international legal documents and modern (as well as some immediately pre- and post-modern) literary texts. He demonstrates how the same intellectual currents that flow through the works of authors ranging from Edgar Allan Poe to James Joyce to Vladimir Nabokov are also present in legal doctrines ranging from the law of war to international commercial disputes to human rights.By providing a comparative, interdisciplinary account of this modern phenomenon, Morgan's work highlights the ways judges, lawyers, and state representatives artfully exploit the narratives of international law. It demonstrates that just as modernist literature developed complex narrative techniques as a way of dealing with the human condition, modern international law has developed parallel argumentative techniques as a way of dealing with international political conditions.

From two world wars to rapid industrialization and population shifts, events of the twentieth century engendered cultural anxieties to an extent hitherto unseen, particularly in Europe. In Telling Anxiety, Jennifer Willging examines manifestations of such anxieties in the selected narratives of four women writing in French – Marguerite Duras, Nathalie Sarraute, Annie Ernaux, and Anne Hebert. Willging demonstrates that the anxieties inherent in these women's works (whether attributed to characters, narrators, or implied authors) are multiple in nature and relate to a general post-Second World War scepticism about the power of language to express non-linguistic phenomena such as the destruction and loss of life that a large portion of Europe endured during that period. Willging maintains that while these women writers are profoundly wary of language and its artificiality, they eschew the radical linguistic scepticism of many post-war male writers and theorists. Rather, she argues, the anxiety that these four writers express stems less from a loss of faith in language's referential function than from a culturally ingrained doubt about their own ability as women to make language reflect certain realities. Ultimately, Telling Anxiety shows the crippling obstacles of literary agency for women in the twentieth century from the perspective of those who fully understood the significant responsibility of their work.

Kant considered it to be scandalous that philosophy still had not found a rational proof of the existence of the external world during his time. Arguably, the scandal continues today because scepticism remains a widely debated and extremely divisive issue among contemporary thinkers. Although scholars have devoted considerable attention to Kant's arguments against Cartesian scepticism, the literature still presents gaps and inaccuracies that obscure a full understanding of this issue and its significance for contemporary philosophy. In Kant and the Scandal of Philosophy, Luigi Caranti corrects this omission, providing a thorough historical analysis of Kant's anti-sceptical arguments from the pre-critical period up to the 'Reflexionen zum Idealismus' (1788-93).Caranti demonstrates how reconstructing Kant's critique of scepticism is crucial for understanding the origin of his philosophy and for avoiding serious mistakes that still serve as obstacles to the proper understanding of the Critique of Pure Reason. In particular, Caranti shows how the sceptical challenge leads Kant to the critical stage of his thought. Moreover, this study responds to recent criticism of transcendental idealism, showing how it can serve as the main premise of a powerful anti-sceptical argument whose main structure is suggested by Kant in the 1781 Fourth Paralogism. Erudite and engaging, Kant and the Scandal of Philosophy fills an important void in the literature and breathes new life into this field of inquiry.

In the early modern period, the theatrical stage offered one of the most popular forms of entertainment and aesthetic pleasure. It also fulfilled an important cultural function by displaying modes of behaviour and dramatizing social interaction within a community. Flaunting argues that the theatre in late sixteenth-century England created the conditions for a subculture of style whose members came to distinguish themselves by their sartorial extravagance and social impudence.Drawing on evidence from legal documents, economic treatises, domestic manuals, accounts of playhouse practices, and stage plays, Amanda Bailey critiques standard accounts maintaining that those who flaunted their apparel were simply aspirants, or gaudy versions of the superiors they sought to emulate. Instead, she suggests that what mattered most was not what these young men wore but how they wore their clothes. These young men shared a distinctive sartorial sensibility and used that sensibility to undermine authority at all levels of society. Flaunting therefore, examines male style as a visual form of subversion against the norms of Renaissance England with the stage as the primary source of inspiration for collective identification.A glimpse into both the celebration of and opposition to social irreverence in the early modern period, Flaunting is a fascinating historical account of drama, fashion, and rebellion with surprisingly close parallels to the contemporary world.

Benedetto Croce (1866-1952) was among the most important of those philosophers of the twentieth century who grappled with issues of pure aesthetics. The series of lectures written in 1912 as the inaugural address of the Rice Institute in Texas and collected under the title Breviario di estetica (Breviary of Aesthetics) is undoubtedly Croce's definitive study of the arts, and the work remains foundational in the philosophy of aesthetics to this day. It has been translated into several languages and continues to attract a wide readership.In this edition, the Breviary of Aesthetics is presented in a brand new English translation and accompanied by informative endnotes that discuss many of the philosophers, writers, and works cited by Croce in his original text. The new translation deliberately preserves the idiosyncratic use of language for which Croce was famous, and emphasizes his writing style, which, together with that of Galileo Galilei, is considered to be among the most lucid in Italian literature. An introduction by Remo Bodei discusses the broader impact of the work and places it in historical context. In short, this edition reintroduces a seminal text on aesthetics to a new generation of English-speaking readers, and represents a significant contribution to the Lorenzo Da Ponte Italian Library series.

Winfried Siemerling examines alterity in the work of four innovative postmodern authors, exploring self and other as textual figures of the unknown. Subjectivity appears mediated, in these texts, by a self-reflexive work in language, seeking to grasp itself in relation to a significant and often fascinating, but also enigmatic, other.

The ugly woman is a surprisingly common figure in Italian poetry, one that has been frequently appropriated by male poetic imagination to depict moral, aesthetic, social, and racial boundaries. Mostly used between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries - from the invectives of Rustico Filippi, Franco Sacchetti, and Burchiello, to the paradoxical praises of Francesco Berni, Niccolo Campani and Pietro Aretino, and further to the conceited encomia of Giambattista Marino and Marinisti - the portrayal of female unattractiveness was, argues Patrizia Bettella in The Ugly Woman, one way of figuring woman as 'other.'Bettella shows how medieval female ugliness included transgressive types ranging from the lustful old hag, to the slanderer, the wild woman, the heretic/witch, and the prostitute, whereas Early Modern unattractiveness targeted peasants, mountain dwellers, and black slaves: marginal women whose bodies and manners subvert aesthetic precepts of culturally normative beauty and propriety. Taking a philological and feminist approach, and drawing on the Bakhtinian concept of the grotesque body and on the poetics of transgression, The Ugly Woman is a unique look at the essential counterdiscourse of the celebrated Italian poetic canon and a valuable contribution to the study of women in literature.

Most people are aware of the large and persistent gender imbalance in elected office at all levels of government in Canada, but few appreciate the far greater imbalance that occurs outside of large cities. This deficit arises not from rural voter bias, but from low numbers of female candidates running for winnable seats. The question of why there are so few female candidates has been difficult to answer, largely because we know so little about the pool of potential candidates. Rural Women's Leadership in Atlantic Canada presents results from a regional field-based study, which confronted this challenge directly for the first time. Louise Carbert gathered together small groups of rural community leaders (126 women in all) throughout the four Atlantic provinces, and interviewed them about their experiences and perceptions of leadership, public life, and running for elected office. Their answers paint a vivid picture of politics in rural communities, illustrating how it intersects with family life, work, and the overall local economy. Through discussion of their own reasoned aversion to holding elected office, and of resistance encountered by those who have put their names forward, the interviewees shed much-needed light on the pervasive barriers to the election of women. Carbert not only contextualizes the results in terms of economic and demographic structures of rural Atlantic Canada, but also considers points of comparison and contrast with other parts of the country.

This ambitious interdisciplinary study undertakes a new definition of the eighteenth-century novel's investment in vision and visual culture, tracing the relationship between the development of the novel and that of the equally contentious genre of the portrait, particularly as represented in the novel itself. Working with the novels of Richardson, Fielding, Haywood, Manley, Sterne, Wollstonecraft and Inchbald, and the portraits of Reynolds, Gainsborough, Highmore, Hudson, Hogarth, and others, Private Interests points to the intimate connections between the literary works and the paintings. Arguing that the novel's representation of the portrait sustains a tension between competing definitions of private interests, Conway shows how private interests are figured as simultaneously decorous and illicit in the novel, with the portrait at once an instrument of propriety and of scandal. Examining women's roles as both authors of and characters in the novel and the novel's encounters with the portrait, the author provides a new definition of private interests, one which highlights the development of women's agency as both spectacles and spectators.

In Playing the Hero, Ann Dooley examines the surviving manuscript versions of the greatest of the early Irish sagas, the Tain Bo Cuailnge (Cattle-Raid of Cooley), and creates a picture of the cultural conditions and literary mind-sets under which medieval scribes recreated the text. Dooley argues that the scribes' work is both a transmission and a translation, and that their own changing historical circumstances within the space of one hundred years, from the beginning to the end of the twelfth century, determines the specifics of their literary creativity.Playing the Hero is a unique example of more contemporary literary methodologies – post-structuralist, feminist, historicist and beyond – being used to illuminate the Irish saga world. Dooley provides a commentary for the saga, helping to re-animate its literary sophistication. Her work is an interrogation of both the Irish epic hero – a reading of the male through the medium of feminine discourse – and the process whereby violence as normalized in the saga genre can be recovered as problematic and troubling. Dooley's work is groundbreaking and will provoke a wide response in Medieval Irish studies.