LITERATURE, SCIENCE, AND ANIMAL ADVOCACY IN CANADA: PRACTICAL ZOOCRITICISM

Ponce de Leon Alejandro

Candice Allmark-Kent. Palgrave Macmillan, 2023.

Literature, Science, and Animal Advocacy in Canada: Practical Zoocriticism is the first book-length study of animals in Canadian fiction. Using a historical approach, it offers a much-needed alternative to existing models of animals as symbols of Canadian victimhood. Spanning more than a century, the scope of this book includes classic writers, Ernest Thompson Seton and Charles G. D. Roberts, as well as popular contemporary authors, such as Barbara Gowdy, Yann Martel, Margaret Atwood, and many others.

By recontextualizing these works with closer attention to contemporary scientific and animal advocacy debates, this book offers a fresh new perspective on a wide range of texts. The book is organized chronologically and divided into four parts. Each part covers a period of a few decades and contains a pair of chapters: one “Contexts” history chapter and one “Texts” chapter of literary analysis. Through this perspective, the book demonstrates that what we ‘know’ about other species fluctuates radically over time. Literature, Science, and Animal Advocacy in Canada introduces practical zoocriticism as a method for studying how different forces interact to shape our ideas about other animals.

This book focuses on the changing relationship between literature, science, and animal advocacy in Canada between 1860 and 2010. During this period, fundamental questions about the human-animal divide and our ability to know other species stirred heated debates around animal consciousness, ethics, and how we write about animals. Yet, despite these developments, Canadian anti-cruelty laws have remained largely unchanged since the Victorian era. This book identifies and unpacks a profound discrepancy between animal representation and animal protection in Canada.

Candice Allmark-Kent is an independent scholar in the fields of literature and science, history, and human-animal studies. Born in the United States and raised in Great Britain, she studied at the University of Exeter (England) and Carleton University (Canada). She has published and presented papers on the relationship between literature, science, and animal advocacy. She has also taught British, Irish, and North American literature and history. Her interdisciplinary interests span animal cognition, environmental history, animal ethics, science communication, the politics of representation, and storytelling in games. Her new work explores how narratives can be used to improve public understanding of underrepresented species. She is deeply passionate about the connection between empathy and storytelling. Her specialist expertise is the history of animals in Canadian literature, including the wild animal story and Nature Fakers controversy.