Few Canadian scholars in the twentieth century, if any, surpassed Frank Underhill’s mastery of the historically informed essay. Provocative, eclectic, and iconoclastic, Underhill was a scholar whose sparkling prose and acerbic commentary on history, ideas, and culture could inspire or enrage – and often did both. He pitched his thoughtful essays and reviews at a general audience and drew upon his broad knowledge of the past to illuminate the specious present.
As with other Canadian intellectuals of his generation, Underhill has faded from public memory. We think this unfortunate, because Canada needs more thinkers and writers like him. In our inaugural issue, Kenneth Dewar writes about Underhill the essayist, and in doing so he draws our attention to important differences between the informed essay and the research article. The Underhill Review publishes essays, not research articles. Dewar uses one Underhill essay to draw attention to the inherently discursive nature of the form, and to remind us of other characteristics that distinguish the essay from the article, such as “its personal voice, its relative informality, its manner of directly addressing the reader.”
Many fine journals and reviews publish empirical research; not nearly enough exist in which personal voice can be set free. The Underhill Review addresses this problem by providing just such a forum. “The essay,” Dewar reminds us, “is an expression of voice more than anything else.” We seek writers willing to offer a sustained personal point of view.
The Underhill Review appears for the first time within days of the 118th anniversary of the birth of Frank Underhill and of the 100th birthday of Jacques Barzun, one of the last century’s finest cultural historians. In an essay specially commissioned for this inaugural issue, the doyen of Canadian cultural history, Modris Eksteins, offers his assessment of Barzun and his century and arrives at some sobering conclusions about the writing of history today. “History,” he writes, “must return to its humanist soul,” to “its inherent role as a bridge in the realm of the intellect.”
The inaugural issue also contains review essays by writers from across the country – on the history of the book in Canada, on masculinity and war, and on prime ministerial biographies, for example. In a feature contribution, prize-winning journalist and scholar Robert Sibley offers sustained reflection upon Canadian philosophical thinking and concern through the years.
While we reassure readers that we have no intention of starting an Underhill fetish, we do give notice that essays to come will examine Underhill’s search for the role of the intellectual in Canada and his controversial sojourn into art criticism.
The essays that launch The Underhill Review offer a collective challenge to readers who may wish also to write for it. Do you believe scholars should strive to reach a broad audience, and do so without sacrificing scholarly standards? Can you convey knowledge and insight in the form of an essay rather than a research article, as Eksteins and Dewar do, and as Barzun and Underhill did before them? Do you have the confidence to write plainly and rely on the authority of personal voice instead of citations? Are you tired of writing for a minuscule audience? If so, we look forward to hearing from you.
We welcome contributions from all academic disciplines, or from none, and from those with or without academic affiliation. We also welcome comments, criticisms, and suggestions. The Underhill Review is a work in progress, like The Canadian Forum when as an act of faith a coterie of professors launched it as The Rebel in 1917. On the 90th anniversary of that modest initiative, our own adventure begins. We hope you will become part of it.