George Woodcock – författare

Virginia Woolf said of The Egoist: 'Meredith pays us a supreme compliment to which as novel-readers we are little accustomed ... He imagines us capable of disinterested curiosity in the behaviour of our kind.' In this, the most dazzlingly intellectual of all his novels, Meredith tries to illuminate the pretensions of the most powerful class within the very citadel of security which its members have built. He develops to their logical extremity his ideas on egoism, on sentimentality and on the power of comedy. Meredith saw egoism as the great enemy of truth, feeling and progress, and comedy as the great dissolver of artifice. The Egoist is the extreme expression of his recurrent theme: the defeat of egoism by the power of comedy.

A study of the changing attitudes of Canadians that accompanied the many political, social, and technological changes in the century between the War of 1812-14 and the Great War.

To what degree can anarchism be an effective organized movement? Is it realistic to think of anarchist ideas ever forming the basis for social life itself? These questions are widely being asked again today in response to the forces of economic globalization. The framework for such discussions was perhaps given its most memorable shape, however, in George Woodcock's classic study of anarchism-now widely recognized as the most significant twentieth-century overview of the subject.  Woodcock surveys all of the major figures that shaped anarchist thought, from Godwin and Proudhon to Bakunin, Goldman, and Kropotkin, and looks as well at the long-term prospects for anarchism and anarchist thought. In Woodcock's view "pure" anarchism-characterized by "the loose and flexible affinity group which needs no formal organization"-was incompatible with mass movements that require stable organizations, that are forced to make compromises in the face of changing circumstances, and that need to maintain the allegiance of a wide range of supporters. Yet Woodcock continued to cherish anarchist ideals; as he said in a 1990 interview, "I think anarchism and its teachings of decentralization, of the coordination of rural and industrial societies, and of mutual aid as the foundation of any viable society, have lessons that in the present are especially applicable to industrial societies."This classic work of intellectual history and political theory (first published in the 1960s, revised in 1986) is now available exclusively from UTP Higher Education.

The struggle of the Métis of the Saskatchewan River against the government of Canada culminated in the Riel Rebellion of 1885—an event of central importance in shaping almost all of the key polarities of Canadian history. If Riel provided the intellectual inspiration for the Rebellion, it was Gabriel Dumont who provided its strategy, and arguably its soul. Dumont, a leading figure in the Métis society of hunters along the South Saskatchewan, had been president of the short-lived local government, and became "Adjutant General of the Métis people" when a Provisional Government was declared in 1885. After the defeat of the Rebellion by the Canadian militia Dumont lived for several years in the United States, and was for some time a performer in Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show. In his last years he returned to his old home near Batoche (site of the final defeat of the Métis forces in 1885), where he died in 1906.George Woodcock's biography of Dumont displays the author's remarkable gift for evocative narration and description. In the wake of its 1975 publication Canadians had a new reference point in the way they thought of the Riel Rebellion; alongside the spirituality and impulsiveness of Riel was the calm commitment of Dumont, whose intuitive feel for the land and for the moods of his people have now become part of the Canadian historical imagination.For this re-issue of Woodcock's classic biography noted historian J.R. Miller has written a substantial introduction setting Gabriel Dumont in the context of Canadian history as we now understand it, in the context of Canadian historiography, and in the context of Woodcock's other work. As Miller convincingly argues, the biography is richly deserving of a lasting place in Canada's historical literature.