Book

Description

This book compares the ecological imagination of Jack London’s The Call of the Wild and Jiang Rong’s Wolf Totem through the relationship between animal agency, human care, and ecological responsibility. It asks how the novels challenge the treatment of animals as instruments, how narrative form connects individual experience with wider dependencies, and what contradictions arise when animals become figures for human cultural identity. Comparative close reading follows episodes of sale, labor, punishment, rescue, attachment, predation, confinement, and environmental loss. The argument is that the novels develop different, internally divided ethical possibilities. London’s sustained alignment with Buck makes a nonhuman life continuous across changing human purposes, while its heroic trajectory also privileges exceptional strength. Jiang’s account of grassland interdependence enlarges the field of responsibility, while the captive cub exposes the inadequacy of admiration that preserves control over an animal’s conditions of life. The comparison distinguishes third-person narration from focalization, intertextual reception from demonstrable influence, and fictional environmental explanation from independent ecological evidence. The findings locate ethical recognition in moments when an animal’s represented capacities or limits can interrupt a human project. They also show why affection, ecological holism, and symbolic admiration are insufficient on their own: care can coexist with possession, community protection can subordinate individuals, and the wolf can become an instrument of human self-definition. The study contributes a scene-based account of ecological responsibility that preserves the significance of particular lives within the relationships that sustain them. Let’s make our world a better place to live in!