Fauna by Alissa York: Between “Survival”, Environmentalism and Blogging

Alissa York’s Fauna (2010) acts as a bridge between the very origins of the Canadian novel and the present. From the fight against the wilderness by the archetypal fgure of a puritan, austere and ancestral grandfather to the weblogs and environmental activism of the grandchildren of the Anthropocene and the digital age, the novel is quintessentially Canadian. By setting its action in the Don Valley, the most famous ravine of downtown Toronto, it also partakes in a whole genealogy of well-established classics of Canadian and, more specifcally, Torontonian literature.