The advent of nuclear weapons introduced a complex new factor into world politics, drawing a line through history and ensuring that international relations would never be the same. By both accident and design, Canada was a central player in the new nuclear era, as countries grappled with the implications of this revolutionary new development. Canada's decision, unique among pioneer atomic powers, not to acquire a nuclear arsenal has been used to buttress widely differing political agendas, while the factors that shaped the policy-making process have been largely ignored.

Challenge and Continuity is the first full-length attempt to map an important feature of nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature: the thematic novel. It analyses it first in D.H. Lawrence, revealing how in The Rainbow and Women in Love the psychology of the characters is brought into a wider social and ideological context that generates their controlling themes. Having defined an alternative tradition, exemplified by George Eliot and Tolstoy, focused primarily on individual development, it examines how that kind of interest was aligned in the nineteenth century with the thematic, in a...