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Antonine Gerin-Lajoie's Jean Rivard (1862-4) is recognized as a landmark novel in Quebec literature. It has come to be regarded as a typical mid-nineteenth-century example of the conservative and reactionary nationalism and patriotism into which French Canadians withdrew after the crushing of the Patriotes in 1837 and 1838. In this brilliant and iconoclastic study, which is an adaptation and translation into English of his'Jean Rivard'ou l'Art de reussir: Ideologies et utopie dans l'oeuvre d'Antoine Gerin-Lajoie, published in 1991. Robert Major challenges this view of the novel and of the political and intellectual millieu in which it was produced. He suggests that Quebec culture in the nineteenth century was far richer and more diverse than the prevailing view allows. While Jean Rivard is a novel about settlement, the need to develop the virgin territories of Canada, Major contends that it also a success story based on the American model of Horatio Alger -- a novel which advocates economic liberalism and urbanization as well as rugged individualism. Through his analysis of Jean Rivard Major re-examines the attitudes to the United States common in the period and points to the way sin which the United States functioned in Quebec political imagery as an icon of democracy.

Setting out to demonstrate the effect of politics on the work of T. S. Eliot, T. S. Eliot and Ideology charts first of all the influence of French reactionary thinking on Eliot's prose and poetry, and further argues that this political inheritance provided the intellectual framework he employed throughout his career. Asher's concentration on the specifically ideological separates this book from previous works on Eliot, and sheds light on Eliot's celebrated mid-career conversion to Catholicism. What results is a re-estimation of Eliot's view of literary history and literary theory, and new appraisals of several major poems and plays. Finally, the book discusses at length how Eliot's ideology profoundly influenced the study of literature in the English-speaking world for several decades.

Oscar Kenshur combines trenchant analyses of important early-modern texts with a powerful critique of postmodern theories of ideology. He thereby contributes both to our understanding of Enlightenment thought and to contemporary debates about cultural studies and critical theory.While striving to resolve'dilemmas'occasioned by conflicting intellectual and political commitments, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century writers often relied upon ideas originally used by their enemies to support very different claims. Thus, they engaged in what Kenshur calls'intellectual co-optation.'In exploring the ways in which Dryden, Bayle, Voltaire, Johnson, and others used this technique, Kenshur presents a historical landscape distinctly different from the one constructed by much contemporary theory.Oscar Kenshur combines trenchant analyses of important early-modern texts with a powerful critique of postmodern theories of ideology. He thereby contributes both to our understanding of Enlightenment thought and to contemporary debates about cultural stu