Bentley includes eighteen long poems by writers with first-hand experience of Canada, including Henry Kelsey, Thomas Cary, John Strachan, Thomas Moore, Oliver Goldsmith, John Richardson, Joseph Howe, William Kirby, Isabella Valancy Crawford, and Archibald Lampman. His commentaries offer a wealth of vital information on each poem, such as its place in the Canadian tradition, its prose sources, incidents and people from whom the poet drew inspiration, and structural and stylistic analysis. Mimic Fires provides a historical overview, a retrospective conclusion, and an extensive bibliography, and is informed throughout by ecopoetic, feminist, new historicist, and post-colonial theories. By improving our understanding of nineteenth-century Canadian writing, Mimic Fires in turn affects how we view writing in Canada in this century.

Joseph Priestley, the eighteenth-century scientist who discovered oxygen, was one of the most remarkable thinkers of his time. This collection of essays by a team of experts covers the full range of his work in the fields of education, politics, philosophy, and theology, and firmly re-establishes him as a major intellectual figure.

This book explores the religious concerns of Enlightenment thinkers from Thomas Hobbes to Thomas Jefferson. Using an innovative method, the study illuminates the intellectual history of the age through interpretations of Jesus between c.1650 and c.1826. The book demonstrates the persistence of theology in modern philosophy and the projects of social reform and amelioration associated with the Enlightenment. At the core of many of these projects was a robust moral-theological realism, sometimes manifest in a natural law ethic, but always associated with Jesus and a commitment to the sovereign goodness of God. This ethical orientation in Enlightenment discourse is found in a range of different metaphysical and political identities (dualist and monist; progressive and radical) which intersect with earlier ‘heretical’ tendencies in Christian thought (Arianism, Pelagianism, and Marcionism). This intellectual matrix helped to produce the discourses of irenic toleration which are a legacy of the Enlightenment at its best.