This thesis examines the origins of athleticism in England and its transfer to Canada. During the course of the nineteenth century, the focus of the English public schools changed dramatically. At the start of the century an English upper-class student's leisure time was largely employed in roaming the country-side, trespassing on neighboring estates and poaching. Teachers' responsibilities ended at the classroom door. Seventy-five years later an English public school student's life was focussed on games and team sports including cricket and the various types of football. Teachers now ran all aspects of school life which was designed to instill the manly, Christian, virtues which would enable graduates to take their proper place as leaders in the British Empire. And team sports were a vehicle to achieve that end. Team sports such as cricket and rugby, and the various institutions that promoted them, occupied a central place in upper-class English life and became infused with what Professor Mangan refers to as the 'games ethic': the ideology of athleticism. When the British administrators, soldiers, and immigrants came to Canada they brought with them their love of games and this 'games ethic' that was modified by Canadian experience. In England the 'ethic' was firmly entrenched and supported by a unique class and social structure. Because that structure did not exist in Canada, the attempts of early British Canadians to instill the 'ethic' in the new country were problematic and played out in the conflict between amateurs and professionals. Although an emerging working-class culture and an increasingly commercialized society challenged and eventually made the distinction between amateur and professional athletes irrelevant, belief in the 'games ethic' and in the instrumental value of team sports survived and continues to influence Canadian sport policy today.

Anglophone women, working in a new capacity as federal civil servants, exercised a significant influence on Canadian immigration policy in the interwar years. This dissertation focuses on the women's division of the Canadian Department of Immigration and Colonization, an agency charged with recruiting British women for domestic service from 1919 to 1938. The division was a product of the women's wing of the social reform movement and prevailing theories of gender difference and anglo-superiority. Tracing its nearly twenty years of operations shows how the division, initially regarded as a source of imperial strength and a means of English Canada's cultural survival, came to symbolize the disadvantages of Canada's connection to Great Britain and supposed weaknesses inherent in the female character. This institutional study explores the real and imagined connections among gender, imperialism, and the changing socio-economic landscape of interwar Canada.

This thesis examines the origins of athleticism in England and its transfer to Canada. During the course of the nineteenth century, the focus of the English public schools changed dramatically. At the start of the century an English upper-class student's leisure time was largely employed in roaming the country-side, trespassing on neighboring estates and poaching. Teachers' responsibilities ended at the classroom door. Seventy-five years later an English public school student's life was focussed on games and team sports including cricket and the various types of football. Teachers now ran all aspects of school life which was designed to instill the manly, Christian, virtues which would enable graduates to take their proper place as leaders in the British Empire. And team sports were a vehicle to achieve that end. Team sports such as cricket and rugby, and the various institutions that promoted them, occupied a central place in upper-class English life and became infused with what Professor Mangan refers to as the 'games ethic': the ideology of athleticism. When the British administrators, soldiers, and immigrants came to Canada they brought with them their love of games and this 'games ethic' that was modified by Canadian experience. In England the 'ethic' was firmly entrenched and supported by a unique class and social structure. Because that structure did not exist in Canada, the attempts of early British Canadians to instill the 'ethic' in the new country were problematic and played out in the conflict between amateurs and professionals. Although an emerging working-class culture and an increasingly commercialized society challenged and eventually made the distinction between amateur and professional athletes irrelevant, belief in the 'games ethic' and in the instrumental value of team sports survived and continues to influence Canadian sport policy today. / Arts, Faculty of / History, Department of / Graduate

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published_or_final_version / Chinese / Master / Master of Philosophy

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Does it matter how history is interpreted? If two historians interpret the same events in different ways, as they quite often do, does it make any difference to anyone? Should anyone care whether the interpretations differ? Similarly, if history textbooks used in the schools vary in their interpretations of the same story, should anyone be concerned? [...]

This thesis explores contemporary Canadian cinema by investigating the convergence of films, policy and criticism as they are implicated in the idea of canon. Both fluid and multiple in its frame(s) of reference, the term canon extends beyond a list or core of privileged texts to include the processes of evaluation. Posited as a performative construct, the national cinema canon can be seen as offering a strategically deployed expression of national cultural identity, with appraisals of each film's value arising from the intersection of critical and governmental discourses; however, narrow admission criteria along with the displaced goal of developing a distinctive national art cinema reinforce perceptions of absence-of Canadian culture and/or identity-by delimiting canonical boundaries to exclude more than they include. Focussing on feature film production since 1984, and adopting a predominantly English Canadian perspective, this thesis aims to examine the underlying assumptions that direct canon formation; rather than attempting to reject or replace the existing canon, this process of rereading entails working within the prevailing discourses in order to generate an awareness of the politics of selection. Emerging from a tradition of liberal humanist nationalism, canon formation in the Canadian context invokes conflicting conceptions of high cultural enlightenment and mass commodity success which have become entrenched as a continuing tension between cultural and industrial goals. These tensions are further complicated by a "double conscious" perspective that simultaneously values and rejects American cinema culture. Chapter One explores the factors shaping the admission criteria of origin and value, while Chapter Two addresses the relationship between national culture and canon formation. Chapter Three considers the ways in which Canadian cinema is defined through policy, including a case study of the 1999 Feature Film Advisory Committee Report, which encapsulates the directional challenges facing cultural policy development. Approaches to devising a descriptive canon are addressed in Chapter Four, in which hybrid categories are suggested that could be used to supplant the nationalist perspective with an acknowledgement of the fluidity of the metaphysical frontier of culture, and hence the transnational, or perhaps post-nationalist, aspects of Canadian cultural experience.