Of Sunken Islands and Pestilence: Restoring the Voice of Edward Taylor Fletcher to Nineteenth-Century Canadian Literature

Edward Taylor Fletcher was born in England in 1817 and arrived in Canada as a young boy. An important figure in Canadian literature, Fletcher’s writing was almost entirely forgotten by history. In this volume, James Gifford has gathered and annotated Fletcher’s essays and poems, writings that describe a nineteenth-century Canadian cultural life far more cosmopolitan than what we might have imagined.

Fletcher was a voracious reader of works in many languages and although he was oriented towa...