Abstract
Taking the wild animal story as a debatable genre across cultures, this article examines the poetics of wildlife representation in Ernest Thompson Seton’s Wild Animals I Have Known and Shixi Shen’s major works, especially The Dream to Make a King. The study incorporates a comparison of the forms and degrees of anthropomorphism, narrative empathy, generic assumptions in writing about animals, and environmental implications across cultures. It is argued that Seton’s wild animal stories, based on the zoosemiotic observation of animals’ lives, enact a zoopoetic notion of multispecies co-authorship, whereas Shen’s stories, developed as a culture-specific variation of the genre, endorse ecoambiguity with taxonomic categories of humans and nonhumans, and of the fantastic and the realistic, frequently blurred and dissolved into one another. The comparative poetics of the selected wild animal stories not only bring to light the aesthetic complexity of this literary genre across cultures, but also illustrate the ethical ramifications of representing wildlife in the midst of the sixth mass extinction.
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University of Macau, SRG 2019-00169-FAH, Chengcheng You. Chinese National Social Science Foundation Key Project “Literature Compilation and Research on the Overseas Chinese Scholars’ Theories and Thoughts of Chinese Literature and Arts” (grant 18ZDA265).
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You, C. Debatable genre: comparative poetics in the wild animal stories of Ernest Thompson Seton and Shixi Shen. Neohelicon 49, 321–336 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11059-021-00616-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11059-021-00616-8