"'Robin Mathews was a man for his times, rabble-rouser, provocateur, patriot, silver-tongued orator, and a fearless in-your-face public intellectual butting heads with Canada's elites,' writes Daniel Drache, a contributor to this collection of original essays, discussing Mathews' remarkable influence on the awakening of a distinctly Canadian identity. Between the late 1960s and early 1990s, Robin Mathews engaged in public debates and provoked controversies about corporate takeovers, foreign control of Canada's trade union movement, the news media, book and magazine publishing, university hiring practices and curriculum, and mass culture. In these nine essays, recognized contributors including Daniel Drache, Pat Smart, Duncan Cameron, Susan Crean, Alvin Finkel, Misao Dean, Errol Sharpe, Bill Law and Ron Dart explore and document Mathews' enormous influence on Canadian politics and culture. For more than two decades, Mathews was a force to be reckoned with as he criss-crossed the country, often at his own expense, talking to students, professors, politicians, and artists about the need to establish and support a unique Canadian identity and politics and, what he termed, "promoting cultural literacy." His personal charisma coupled with his boundless energy is the narrative thread of this collection: an activist and public intellectual with the compelling idea to establish a public movement to transform Canada into a culturally literate and economically sovereign nation. Mathews' work led directly to the growth of Canadian studies in both English and French, the new hiring of Canadian candidates at universities across the country, the founding of the Great Canadian Theatre Company, the rise of the Canadian trade union movement, and the publication of his own substantial body of written work."-- Provided by publishe
