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Animal Fiction in Late Twentieth-Century Canada fulfils a vital contribution to the conversation surrounding animal representation as a point of continuity in national narratives and supports the idea that focusing on narratives of responsibility and care influences better relations with both non-human animals and across settler-Indigenous boundaries. Alice Higgs engages with on-going debates regarding reconciliation by demonstrating that it is imperative to critique settler colonial environmental frameworks and place autonomy back into Indigenous communities by bringing Indigenous practices of custodianship and relationality to bear more generally. This book also develops a number of conversations in animal studies in relation to the politics of representation. Higgs studies a range of canonical Canadian authors, demonstrating a progress across the period in which it is possible to identify the emergence of a literary pro-animal turn.
List of contents
1 Introduction: Nation, Identity, Species.- 2 Reconfiguring Animal Narratives in Farley Mowat's Never Cry Wolf (1963).- 3 Trauma on Display: Women's Wilderness Writing and Animal Ciphers in Margaret Atwood's Surfacing (1972) and Life Before Man (1979).- 4 Writing Bear(s): Thematising the Canadian Animal Story in Marian Engel's Bear (1976).- 5 Queership, Kinship, Careship: Adopting An Ethics of Care in Timothy Findley's The Wars (1977) and Not Wanted on the Voyage (1984).- 6 Unsettling Coyote: Engaging with Indigenous Concepts of Care in Gail Anderson-Dargatz's The Cure for Death by Lightning (1996).- 7 Conclusion.
About the author
Alice Higgs is a Visiting Lecturer at the University of Roehampton. She has held Honorary Researcher status at the University of Kent, host to The Centre for Indigenous and Settler Colonial Studies, and she has been a long-term member of the Animal Studies Research Centre at the University of Sheffield. Her research looks at the representation of human-animal relationships in contemporary North American literature.
