The Lovers Quarrel

Although not a professional historian, the author raises several issues pertinent to the state of history today. Qualifying the 'non-historian' as an 'able' interventionist in historical studies, the author explores the relationship between history and theory within the current epistemological configurations and refigurations. He asks how history transcends the obsessive 'linguistic' turn, which has been hegemonizing literary/discourse analysis, and focuses greater attention on historical experience and where history stands in relation to our understanding of ethics, religion and the current state of global politics that underlines the manipulation and abuse of history.

The United States has had not one, but two Foundings. The Constitution produced by the Second Founding came to be only after a vociferous battle between Federalists and Anti-Federalists. The Federalists favored a relatively powerful central government, while the Anti-Federalists distrusted the concentration of power in one place and advocated the preservation of sovereignty in the states as crucibles of post-revolutionary republicanism -- the legacy of the First Founding. This philosophical cleavage has been at the heart of practically every major political conflict in U.S. history, and lives on today in debates between modern liberals and conservatives. In The Lovers' Quarrel, Elvin T. Lim presents a systematic and innovative analysis of this perennial struggle. The framers of the second Constitution, the Federalists, were not operating in an ideational or institutional vacuum; rather, the document they drafted and ratified was designed to remedy the perceived flaws of the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union. To decouple the Two Foundings is to appreciate that there is no such thing as "original meaning," only original dissent. Because the Anti-Federalists insisted that prior and democratically sanctioned understandings of federalism and union had to be negotiated and partially grafted onto the new Constitution, the Constitution's Articles and the Bill of Rights do not cohere as well together as has conventionally been thought. Rather, they represent two antithetical orientations toward power, liberty, and republicanism. The altercation over the necessity of the Second Founding generated coherent and self-contained philosophies that would become the core of American political thought, reproduced and transmitted across two centuries, whether the victors were the neo-Federalists (such as during the Civil War and the New Deal) or the neo-Anti-Federalists (such as during the Jacksonian era and the Reagan Revolution). The Second Founding -- the sole "founding" that we generally speak of -- would become a template for the unique, prototypically American species of politics and political debate. Because of it, American political development occurs only after the political entrepreneurs of each generation lock horns in a Lovers' Quarrel about the principles of one of the Two Foundings, and succeed in justifying and forging a durable expansion or contraction of federal authority.

Already an award-winning poet, Carmine Starnino has also made his mark as a literary critic of great pluck, probity and irreverence. His highly regarded, often highly controversial writings on poetry have enlivened -- and often enraged -- the Canadian literary scene since they first began appearing in the late 1990s. He has tackled the careers of some of this country's most notable poets (among them Irving Layton, Michael Ondaatje, Anne Carson, Tim Lilburn, Susan Musgrave, Christopher Dewdney) and done so in prose of great subtlety and style. Indeed, in Starnino's literary criticism seditiousness and insight are made to live inside sentences that always square their shoulders and draw themselves to their full verbal height. A Lover's Quarrel culls some of the highlights of Starnino's dissenting exploits, and includes the never-before-published title essay, an ambitious reassessment of Canadian poetry. For readers unfamiliar with Starnino's criticism, the release of A Lover's Quarrel furnishes the perfect opportunity to read one of the few critics in Canada who can speak his mind and speak it well.

Using original interviews with America's leading evangelicals, Warren Smith provides a state-of-the-movement address, calling the church to repent of its involvement in the cultural decline of the West.