Swan's impact on the Canadian literary and political scene has been far-reaching. Swan coined the term "sexual gothic" to describe contemporary gothic novels that use the body as the site of the narrative the way 19th-century gothic novels used a ruined building as their literary setting. "Gender gothic" is another name for sexual gothic since many novels in the 1990s dealt with aspects of gender or gender changes. In the fall of 1993, a theatrical dramatization of The Wives of Bath was performed in Toronto, Chicago and New York with the Canadian authors Barbara Gowdy and Eric McCormack. The theatrical evening was billed, "An Evening of Sexual Gothic".