When the American critic, Edmund Wilson, first encountered the essays of Hugh MacLennan in 1960, he claimed to find in them "a point of view surprisingly and agreeably different from anything else I knew in English.... a Canadian way of looking at things which had little in common with either the 'American' or the British colonial one and which has achieved a self-confident detachment in regard to the rest of the world." It is for this self-conscious expression of Canada's national character that MacLennan is best known. As he theorizes in a number of his essays, he was the first Canadian novelist to attempt to set the local stage on which the nation's dramas might be played before an international audience. The success of this venture can be determined by the sales his seven novels have enjoyed inside and outside Canada, the large number of languages into which his...