The Imperialist - Softcover

Duncan, Sara Jeannette; Tausky, Thomas

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Softcover

ISBN 10: 189613338X ISBN 13: 9781896133386

Publisher: Tecumseh Press, 1996

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Book by Duncan, Sara Jeannette, Tausky, Thomas

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From the Back Cover

Set in the fictional Ontario town of Elgin at the beginning of the twentieth century, this 1904 novel was in its own time addressed largely to British readers. It has since become a Canadian classic, beloved for its ironic and dryly humorous portrait of small-town life. But The Imperialist is also a fascinating representation of race, gender, and nationalism in Britain’s “settler colonies.” This Broadview edition provides a wealth of contextual material invaluable to understanding the novel’s historical context, and particularly the debate, central to the story, over Edwardian Canada’s role in the British Empire.

This edition includes a critical introduction and, in the appendices, excerpts from Sara Jeannette Duncan’s journalism and autobiographical sketches (including an essay on “North American Indians”), speeches by Canadian and British politicians, political cartoons, and recipes for the dishes served at the novel’s social gatherings. Contemporary reviews of the novel from British, Canadian, and American periodicals are also included.

From the Inside Flap

te Duncan’s classic portrait of a turn-of-the-century Ontario town, The Imperialist captures the spirit of an emergent nation through the example of two young dreamers. Impassioned by “the Imperialist idea,” Lorne Murchison rests his bid for office on his vision of a rejuvenated British Empire. His sister Advena betrays a kindred attraction to the high-flown ideals in her love for an unworldly, and unavailable, young minister. Nimbly alternating between politics and romance, Duncan constructs a superbly ironic object-lesson in the Canadian virtue of compromise.

Sympathetic, humorous, and wonderfully detailed, The Imperialist is an astute analysis of the paradoxes of Canadian nationhood, as relevant today as when the novel was first published in 1904.

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