Canadian Literature and Medicine breaks new ground by formulating a series of frameworks with which to read and interpret a national literature derived from the very fabric of that literature – in this case Canadian. Canadian literature is of particular interest because of its consideration of coloniality, Indigeneity, and coincident development alongside a nascent socialized medical system currently under threat from neoliberalism.
The first chapters of the book carefully track the development of Canada’s socialized medical system as it manifests in the imaginations of the nation’s poets and authors who depict care. Reciprocal flows are investigated in which these poets and authors are quoted in policy documents. The archive-based methodology is sustained in subsequent chapters that rely upon a unique interdisciplinary mix of medical history, philosophy of medicine, medical policy, theory inherent to the field of Canadian literature (focusing in particular on the garrison mentality as a form of aesthetic protest and the feminist ethics of care), and Indigenous ways of knowing.
Table of Contents:
Section I: Theoretical Entanglements
Chapter 1. Canadian Literature, Place, and Identity: Origins, Entanglements, and Futures
Chapter 2. Defining a Critical Apparatus: Feminist Care Ethics, Biomedicine, and Narrative Medicine
Chapter 3. Visions of Health in Indigenous and Christian Epistemologies: A Discussion of Jacques Cartier’s Voyages and a Taste of Indigenous Story Medicine
Section II: Indigenous Care and Narrative Medicine
Chapter 4. The Origin Story of Care on the Land Is Indigenous
Chapter 5. Narrative Medicine and Indigenous Story Medicine: Biomedicine, Colonialism, Holism
Section III: Co-constructions of Canadian Literature and Medicine
Chapter 6. Garrison and Hospital: The Co-construction of Canadian Socialized Medicine and Canadian Literature in Early Canadian Literature
Chapter 7. CanLit’s Turn to Realism: The Co-construction of CanLit and Canadian Medicine Post-World War I to 1970
Section IV: Neoliberal Care
Chapter 8. Biomedical Neoliberalism in Canadian Literature
Chapter 9. The Neoliberalization of Public Health in Saleema Nawaz’s Songs for the End of the World
Conclusion
About the Author :
Shane Neilson is a Fellow of the Family Physicians of Canada and has been practising medicine since 2000. He is currently an assistant clinical professor and faculty member of the Waterloo Regional Campus of McMaster University. He earned his Ph.D. in English in 2019 from McMaster, where he was awarded the Governor-General’s Gold Medal for his dissertation work. Neilson also was awarded SSHRC’s “Talent” award given to a single Canadian Ph.D. student in the social sciences and humanities in 2018. The author of many trade books of poetry, nonfiction, and short fiction, Neilson lives with his family along the Grand River in Cambridge, Ontario.
