Haliburton’S Eye and Ear
Walter S. Avis was so thoroughly a Canadian that it is perhaps necessary to take special note of his contributions to the international community of scholars devoted to the study of English and the English-speaking peoples. Certainly his broad perspective is everywhere revealed in his scholarship. In his study of Canadian eh?, for instance, he speaks of the corpus he collected when his reading was “arbitrarily limited to books in my own library, to newspapers and periodicals that passed normally through my hands, to radio and TV programs, and to such oral examples as I had the opportunity to observe and set down” (1978:174). Yet such “arbitrary limits” encompassed writers and speakers who represent Britain, Canada, the United States, South Africa, and Australia and covered uses from the eighteenth century to the present. With the best of scholars, Avis was meticulous, thorough, wide-ranging, and devoted to the real evidence of real people speaking and writing.
Expansion Without Western Missionary Agency and Constructing Confessional Identities: The African Orthodox Church Between the United States, South Africa, and East Africa (1921–1940)
