Responding to the comprehensive topic ‘Old Environments – New Environments’, scholars from a variety of disciplines reflect the various connotations that the term ‘environment’ carries in a Canadian context. Whether moving within the realm of foreign policy, visual arts, constitutional questions, tourism, nature preservation or aboriginal rights, these essays put the capaciousness and cohesiveness of the nation to the test by illustrating the pressures enforced upon it by multiculturalism, the claims for self-determination, anti-confederate agitation and globalisation. The environments scrutinised are many and various, but within each the linchpin remains the quest for identity on the part of the individual, the group or the nation at large. Individually as well as collectively, the essays in this volume constitute an important contribution to the ongoing debate on Canadianness.

The Editors: Robert C. Thomsen received his Ph.D. from the University of Aarhus where he is now employed in the Department of English as Director of the Canadian Studies Centre. He is also Secretary of the Nordic Association for Canadian Studies. Nanette L. Hale received her Ph.D. from the Department of English, University of Aarhus, in 2003. Her primary areas of research are postcolonial literatures, contemporary British fiction and the representation of time and space in literature.