Introduction

Introduction The decision to devote this "Atlantic Aspects" issue of the Journal ofCanadian Studies to the study of regional culture was not taken lightly. "Culture," as Raymond Williams has shown, is a complex word that defies easy definition .1 The concept of "Atlantic Canada" is also a difficult one. Outside of those who wish, for bureaucratic or other reasons, to reduce this country to a series of simplistically-drawn divisions such as "the Atlantic" - a watery definition if ever there was one - it is hard to find defenders of the notion that the Maritimes and Newfoundland can or should be lumped together. To pretend that a single common regional culture has ever existed would not only betray ignorance of the cultural significance of the Cabot Strait but would also underestimate a host of other important distinctions based on language and ethnicity, social class, historical development, and human geography. Nevertheless, it is our unabashed belief that cultural studies of Atlantic Canada, diverse as they must be, rightly belong to a single journal edition. There are common elements in the experience of Maritimers and Newfoundlanders , shaped by such general forces as the historical influence of major waves of migration from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, and the more recent struggle against economic underdevelopment. We believe that cultural study, as well as having its own intrinsic importance, can contribute to the resolving of social and economic questions, as the late David Alexander a persuasive advocate, incidentally, of the existence of an Atlantic region argued in declaring that "an intellectual portrait of the country" could provide "more of the answers to the problems of Newfoundland's economic history than its economic historians are ever likely to supply."2 Accordingly, our definition of "culture" has been made deliberately accommodating . We have invited contributors to deal with culture either in the wide, "anthropological" sense, incorporating the study of any learned pattern of behaviour that is characteristic of a particular society, or in the narrower sense that concentrates on creative or artistic expression.3 One of the main insights that the articles collectively offer, in fact, is that these two kinds of culture - culture as a way of life, and culture as creativity - are closely related in Atlantic Canada. The collection also gives a sense, we hope, of the dynamic nature of cultural development, both historically and in terms of present and future trends. It is not comprehensive: apart from the general impossibility of encapsulating cultural diversity in one journal issue, we are conscious that there are important areas that have been covered sketchily or not at all. We shall be satisfied, however, if this special edition can make more accessible a field of enquiry that has been unduly neglected hitherto, and where mythmaking has all too often prevailed over scholarly analysis. The opening articles, by James Overton and Ian McKay, provide a salutary reminder that this tendency towards myth-making has ensured that culture in Atlantic Canada is not always what it seems. Overton presents a sceptical view Joumal of Canadian Studies 3 Vol. 23, Nos. 1 & 2 (Printemps!Ete 1988 Spring/Summer) of the recent rediscovery in Newfoundland of "the ancestral wisdom of the outports," which he argues has been turned to the service of political conservatism . The supposed tradition of rural self-reliance, Overton suggests, can be used to provide a justification for the state to abdicate responsibility for dealing with the results of poverty and unemployment. McKay also considers the uses of questionable traditions in his discussion of J.F.B. Livesay's romanticized portrayal of the small community of Peggy's Cove. Livesay and others, McKay argues, participated in constructing the myth of a "world of folk communities living in harmony with nature," which continues to be promoted for the benefit of tourists despite the harsher realities of regional disparity past and present. The two articles, taken together, make a strong case for reappraisal of cultural traditions, in order to separate reality from potentially harmful mythology. The articles by M. Brook Taylor and Stanley E. McMullin offer reevaluations of important aspects of Nova Scotia's intellectual history in the nineteenth century. Taylor examines the controversies that erupted, especially in the 1880s, between...