Law, rhetoric and irony in the formation of Canadian civil culture / Michael Dorland and Maurice Charland.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Dorland, Michael.

Contributor:

Charland, Maurice René.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Civilization.

Law.

History.

Civil society.

Canada--Politics and government.

Canada.

Politics and government.

Civil society--Canada.

Law--Canada--History.

Canada--Civilization--French influences.

Canada--Civilization--English influences.

Physical Description:

xiv, 359 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm

Place of Publication:

Toronto ; Buffalo : University of Toronto Press, 2002.

Summary:

The phrase 'Peace, Order, and Good Government' is to Canada what 'Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness' is to the United States, a project of the authority of governance. But more than that, the phrase speaks to the arts and manners of governance; the styles or mentalites that both inform and perform how governance gets acted out ... Both phrases reflect a common historical discourse that permeated such discussions in the early modern period. The difference between the two is that the Canadian one derives from an earlier period in the discussion; the American phrase appears at its end, an end that will be forever ruptured by political revolution and revolutionary war ... In the Canadian case, while there will be breaks and ruptures in the modes of governance, these will not be clothed in the language of revolutionary discourse. On the contrary, and this is vital to this study, Canada stumbles into the modern age without having recourse to the facilities revolutionary language provides ... The resulting inarticulateness has been one of the principle problems that Canadian political and civil culture has faced.

Contents:

Envoi 3

1 Situating Canada's Civil Culture 14

2 'Who Killed Canadian History?' The Uses and Abuses of Canadian Historiography 41

3 The Legitimacy of Conquest: Issues in the Transition of Legal Regimes, 1760s-1840s 77

4 Constituting Constitutions under the British Regime, 1763-1867 118

5 The Limits of Law: The North-West, Riel, and the Expansion of Anglo-Canadian Institutions, 1869-1885 153

6 'Impious Civility': Woman's Suffrage and the Refiguration of Civil Culture, 1885-1929 191

7 The Dialectic of Language, Law, and Translation: Manitoba and Quebec Revisited, 1969-1999 223

8 Civility, Its Discontents, and the Performance of Social Appearance 258

9 The Figures of Authority in Canadian Civil Culture 290.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

080204283X

0802081193

OCLC:

49204493