Living with Coyotes: Rethinking Human-Animal Relations, from Aesop to <em>Prodigal Summer</em>

Abstract

What are the emotional stakes and cultural afterlife of living with wild animals in a shared habitat? The process of historically grounding our analysis of literary texts such as Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver and T.C. Boyle's Tortilla Curtain led us to shift our focus. Fictional narratives about the role that emotions play in human-animal relations have many antecedents in historical and religious texts. We chose six texts or stories for a historical survey: Aesop's fable “A Man and a Lion Dispute”; the Biblical story of Balaam and his talking donkey; St. Francis of Assisi taming a wolf; John Muir siding with bears; George Orwell's comments on how he came to write Animal Farm, and Aldo Leopold's “Thinking Like a Mountain”. We work where possible with versions of these stories from children's literature. A close reading of a scene from Prodigal Summer is presented as an end point of this continuum. In concluding, we briefly discuss Tortilla Curtain as a means to illustrate the process of generic transformation in writing about human-animal relations.