Main description:

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 a 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.

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