The National Allegory of Fraternity: Loyalist Literature and the Making of Canada’s White British Origins

This essay critically examines a rhetorical trope that contributed significantly to the naturalization of white British masculinity as the assumed norm for Canadian citizenship, the “allegory of fraternity” - and particularly its menacing corollary of fratricide - reappears over a 100-year span (1840 to 1943) in novels, epic poems and verse dramas that posit the United Empire Loyalists as the nation’s progenitors, especially through the times …