The environment has always been part of the Canadian story from literature of settlement in an inhospitable northern climate to the narratives of small-town life in distinctly regional and rural Canada.
Speculative Fiction, with its roots in the imaginings of new lands and new peoples, has historically been allied to the colonial literature of Great Britain and the US cultural and literary imagination of the frontier. However in Canada it finds a more problematized relationship one that involves survival rather than colonization, refugees rather than explorers.
My research investigates how contemporary environmental and feminist concerns inform and invigorate the speculative imaginations of English and Quebecois writers in Canada.