Animal–Human Entanglements in the Canadian Wild Animal Stories of Charles G. D. Roberts

Abstract

One of the most inventive and distinctive formal and generic interventions into modern writings about animals was the advent of the realistic wild animal story at the turn-of-the-century. As Adrian Hunter has pointed out, it was in the 1890s that ‘a three-way alignment between realism, the short story, and various forms of cultural radicalism and avant-gardism came into being,’ signalling the advent of a new modernist moment. The wild animal story, resultantly, demonstrates the current renegotiation of modernist literary and cultural contours with its formal and thematic preoccupations. Pioneered by Canadian writers Sir Charles G.D. Roberts and Ernest Thompson Seton, this unique genre interwove fiction with accounts of animal behaviour based on developments in animal psychology, cognitive ethology, and Darwinian theory. This chapter analyses how these authors use established narrative strategies such as naming, perspective, and narration, as well as more porous and prolific techniques such as identification and relationality. Roberts’s positioning of this genre as a means of reaching an ‘enlightened’ and ‘spiritual’ understanding of the ‘world of wonder’ opened by animal psychology, however, also raises political, cultural, and ethical questions about settler-colonialism. This chapter throws open the geographical, temporal, and aesthetic boundaries of these late nineteenth into twentieth century works to interrogate the unique contribution that the wild animal story provides to broader discussions of nonhuman animals in modernity.