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Other selves: Animals in the Canadian Literary Imagination.

Article Excerpt
Janice Fiamengo, ed. Other Selves: Animals in the Canadian Literary Imagination. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press (Reappraisals: Canadian Writers), 2007. 366 pp. $45.00 paper.

This collection of essays constitutes an extremely valuable contribution to the rapidly maturing field of ecocriticism. Janice Fiamengo's introduction sets the stage with an insightful analytical overview of the positioning of animals in Canadian literature, and then places each of her contributors within a three-part framework embracing their papers. The first section, "Reading Strategies for Animal Writing," asks "what it means to speak of realism, accuracy, or avoidance of anthropocentrism in writing about animals." Scholars in the second section, "Animal Writers," explore the work of "individual writers--naturalists, conservationists, reformers, wilderness writers, and animal lovers--who have identified closely with animals." The final section, "The Politics of Animal Representation," addresses "broadly political questions, seeking to understand what representations mean in particular contexts and how they function to serve social or ideological ends" (13). This brief distillation of Fiamengo's far more complex structure should be sufficient to demonstrate the extent to which interdisciplinarity has invaded the field, demanding of its practitioners wide reading outside literature--notably, in biology, visual culture, history, anthropology, philosophy, and politics. Predictably, several papers in this collection are also anchored by either or both of the two posts--colonial and modern. What is particularly refreshing in the best of the essays is the extent to which theories of ecology and ethology (in particular) have challenged the tired conventions characterizing critical writing about the...

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