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Stephen Leacock's work, especially Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (1912), continues to prompt contradictory conclusions about the political imagination expressed in his humorous fiction. Is it liberating or consolatory, subversive or conservative? This essay tries to resolve the question with a dialectical historicist reading of the ideology and logic of Leacock's style. The method is metacritical, aiming to provide a reconciling structure for the more positive claims resulting from nonhistoricist methods of reading Sunshine Sketches, along with the more negative ones resulting from methods addressed to the events and ideologies of Leacock's modernity and his analysis, as a political economist, of this modernity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]