In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

416 LEITERS [N CANADA 1982 At least we know what is pleasant and honest: surely we can agree on political arrangements that are like that (in practice the tried and true ones), and with luck a man can find other things - a friend, a horse, a lady - that will treat him decently and not get too complicated. Brome makes some good poems out of his plain dealing: 'The Wary Woer' or 'Reasons of Love,' for instance, would go very well in anthologies of the period. If they end up there we will have Dubinski's excellent edition to thank. (JAMES CARSCALLEN) Roger L. Emerson, Gilles Girard, and Roseann Runte, editors. Man and Nature / L'Homme et la nature Faculty of Education, University of Western Ontario. xvi, 224. $25.00 This is the first book to be published by the Canaclian Society for Eighteenth -Century Studies. It may be useful here to give a brief history of the remarkable burgeoning, in the last fifteen years, of such scholarly organizations declicated to the interdisciplinary study of the eighteenth century. The animateur of the movement was the late Theodore Besterman , who, at the end of the Second Congress on the Enlightenment at St Andrews, Scotland in 1967 - Besterman had organized the first such congress at Coppet/Geneva a few years before - convened a meeting of those in attendance to consider the formation of an International Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies/Societe Internationale d'etude du XVIll' si~cle. (The two official languages of the [SECS/SlEDS are English and French, but later international conferences have recognized pro hac vice Italian and German, and very possibly future congresses may so recognize FlemishlDutch, Hungarian, and Japanese, since affiliates of the [SECS exist in countries where those languages are spoken.) The Canadian Society is one of its recent affiliates. Besterman's proposal was overwhelmingly approved, and soon afterwards an organizing committee elected at St Andrews, of a dozen scholars in several diSCiplines from several countries, met and drew up a provisional constitution, which was adopted at' the next quadrennial conference at Nancy in 1971. Later congresses, in New Haven, 1975, Pisa, 1979, and (by the time this appears) Brussels, in August 1983, have given testimony to the newly revived enthusiasm for the study of that faSCinating century to whose ideas and attitudes the present world, for better or worse, owes so much. An immediate result of the foundation of the [SECS was the determination of the four North American members of its organizing committee (of whom I was one) to institute an American Society for EighteenthCentury Studies. (Actually, the Societe fran,aise d'etude du XVlll' si~cle, to which many students of French cultural history in Canada and the United States have belonged since its inception, antedated even the International Society.) As one who, in spite of all temptations to belong to other nations, remains a sixth-generation Canadian, I insisted, as organizing secretary of the ASEes, that its constitution specify that the word 'American' in its title be construed as 'North American.' In this I believed that we would be following the example of such venerable organizations as the Modern Language Association of America and the American Historical Association, in which Canadian scholars have been among the most active and distinguished members. (I was happy, a few years ago, when the nominating committee of the MLA, of which I was a member, persuaded Northrop Frye to allow his name to stand for its presidency, a post to which he contributed the distinction that one would have expected.) There has indeed been some justified censure of the limitation of the term'American' to 'North American.' Like so many of us who live north of the Rio Grande, I was dismally ignorant of the fascinating history and literature of dieciochisto Meso-America and America del Sur. Perhaps such inexcusable oversight can be remedied in the future. A perhaps not very important point of the above is my no doubt oldfashioned dislike of the restriction of the term'American' to citizens of the United States, as in the statement in the preface to the volume under review (p xiii), 'While Canadian academics were conSidering the problems of...

pdf

Share