Cognitive ethology and critical anthropomorphism: A snake with two heads and hognose snakes that play dead. Hamman (Eds.), Rethinking nature: Challenging disciplinary boundaries (pp. Vibrant matter: A political ecology of things. Survival: A thematic guide to Canadian literature. The spell of the sensuous: Perception and language in a more-than-human world. 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.Ībram, D. 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 study incorporates a comparison of the forms and degrees of anthropomorphism, narrative empathy, generic assumptions in writing about animals, and environmental implications across cultures. 'About this title' may belong to another edition of this title.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. He has written over 20 prize-winning books for children, most of them stories about animals. In 1975, Shen joined the army, and moved away. He learnt how to fish, build houses, plough fields and work in the paddy fields, and worked at a hydrological power station and as a school teacher in a small village. In this way, he learnt a great deal about animals and how they behave. When he arrived there, he not only got a dog, but went to live in the house of a hunter, who treated him like a son, and took him hunting all over Xishuangbanna. He asked to go to Xishuangbanna, a tropical region in southwest China, mainly because he had heard of all the different animals there, and because he hoped he could have a hunting dog. In 1969, when lots of young people from Chinese cities were sent to remote rural areas, the 16-year-old Shen was asked to choose from nine different regions. Shen Shixi Shen Shixi was born in Shanghai in 1952.

Jackal and Wolf by Shen Shixi