The Virus in the Garrison: Contagious Disease in Canadian Fiction

This dissertation analyzes Canadian representations of contagious disease in novels written after the emergence of HIV/AIDS. Ultimately, I argue that contagion in literature registers distinctive fears about the fluid and changeable nature of Canadian communities in an increasingly globalized world. Most existing scholarship on contagious disease in fiction considers contagion on a global or transnational scale, often in deference to the ease with which viruses cross borders. In contrast, my project contends that purely transnational considerations of disease risk flattening key differences in how national communities—particularly the imagined national communities present in literature—shape contagious diseases both physically and metaphorically. In a Canadian context, literary engagements with contagious disease are situated in a discursively unique environment informed by legacies of colonialism, globalization, and fraught national identity. This research stands as one of the first inquiries into the representation of contagious disease in contemporary Canadian fiction.Each of the chapters attends to one of three narrative motifs common in how Canadian authors deploy contagious disease in their fiction: contact, apocalypse, and mutation. Crucially, the texts under consideration all pair representations of contagious disease as metaphor with an awareness of contagious disease as embodied reality, a connection that speaks to the intersections of imagined community with lived experience. The first chapter, which considers Lee Maracle’s Ravensong duology, attends both to traumatic colonial contact and to the conditions necessary for more equitable forms of engagement. In the apocalypse chapter, I examine how Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven and Nick Cutter’s The Troop engage with the fraught process of confronting precarity. In the final chapter, which centers on mutation, I argue that Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy deconstructs the generic conventions of plague narrative in the service of a commentary on the limitations of narrative in disease contexts. Taken together, these texts chart deep anxieties about the outcomes of confronting the porous boundaries of imagined community on both metaphorical and embodied levels. This dissertation concludes by re- engaging the key claims made in the body of this project in light of the COVID-19 pandemic, finding evidence of further narrative shifts in representations of contagion.

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