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Critics have long noted a discrepancy between Canadian landscape and the imported European literary forms early Canadian writers used to describe a young country. Yet, in the early nineteenth century, some parts of the landscape were actively transformed in ways that would seemingly preclude the need for poets to transform their literary inheritance. This essay examines agricultural reform initiatives in Nova Scotia, which included deforestation in the interest of warming the temperature, as espoused in letters published in the Acadian Recorder. Focusing on Oliver Goldsmith’s The Rising Village, the essay locates a poetics at once beholden to English literary tradition and celebratory of indigenous flora and fauna's "native exoticism," both of which embrace a transformation of British North America into some place familiar to settler-colonials. Although the paradigmatic reading of early Canadian literature as struggling to fit English literary forms to a new landscape remains accurate, this reading of The Rising Village demonstrates how that paradigm struggled to gain acceptance.

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The island, and the fresh water island in particular, is a recurring motif in the work of early Canadian women writers. Using an eco-critical perspective to explore Susan Frances Harrison’s short story “The Idyl of the Island” (1886), Marjorie Pickthall’s short story “On Ile de Paradis” (1906), and Katherine Hale’s long poem, “The Island (Experiment in Magic)” (1934), as well as “island” lyrics by all three authors, we discover tentative but compelling expressions of nature as a place of ambiguous potential and power, depending on the attitude and actions of those who approach it. Focusing as they do on the interaction between human beings and nature, the island texts of early Canadian women writers may be more anthropocentric than biocentric, but they are nonetheless illuminated in the light of three areas of concern in the field of island biogeography: colonization, competition, and trophic cascade. Nature as a virgin to be violated has been a longstanding trope of masculine writing about the wilderness, but Harrison, Pickthall, and Hale point us instead in the direction of nature as mother and sister. In their work, the island conveys an unforgettable message—that it is folly for us to believe we can conquer nature, come to her unprepared, or expect to separate ourselves from her fate.

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This essay examines A Sprig of Mountain Heather, an early pamphlet designed by J.B. Harkin and Mabel Williams to promote Canada’s dominion parks. Familiar in some historical circles but less so in literary ones, the pamphlet provides a fascinating glimpse into the colonial practice of natural history and its role in shaping European relationships to wild spaces such as Simpson Pass, on the border of Rocky Mountains (now Banff) Park. Containing both an actual specimen – a pressed flower from an alpine meadow on the pass – and “a story of the heather” that connects it to Scottish lore and culture, A Sprig of Mountain Heather demonstrates how natural history made it possible for European settlers to imbue even a remote and alien space with the homely resonance of place – a key attribute of the national parks’ colonial and curatorial relationship to wilderness. Read in the light of a wider history of botanical inventory and description both in the mountain parks and elsewhere in Canada, A Sprig of Mountain Heather exemplifies the potency of the natural object as a locus of memory that could at once transport and transplant emigrants, allowing them to establish a deeper connection to lands that were remote both geographically and culturally.

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If, in Jonathan Bate’s view, literary critics would be well served by turning their attentions to a “historical tradition of ecological consciousness,” one obvious starting point for critics of Canadian drama is with the writings of Herman Voaden. Voaden is well known to Canadian theatre scholars as a playwright and director who drew his creative inspiration from the “natural” world, and who, in the 1920s and 30s, viewed what he perceived as the Canadian wilderness as a crucial factor in the shaping of settler identity. Incorporating Bate’s advice, and drawing on insights from Northrop Frye, Val Plumwood, Christopher Manes, and Akira Lippit, this ecocritical study shows how an ecological consciousness came to the fore in Voaden’s writings and how, in his play Murder Pattern, he brings this to its most fully developed form, portraying elements in the more-than-human physical world, not as the ground for human action, but as actions in their own right: sublime agencies that measure human lives vis-a-vis the frailty of mortal desires.

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Critics of Canadian literature such as Cheryl Cowdy, Frank Davey, and Franca Bellarsi construe suburbia as existing somewhere in between the concrete jungle and the verdant wilderness. The ecocritical implications of this geographic and critical positioning, however, have not yet been thoroughly examined. Common images of suburbanites portray people in the “enclosed private worlds of fences, parlours and automobiles,” cut off from their larger communities and environments in collective isolation. Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye (1988) depicts how this separate-from-nature culture is fostered. As Elaine Risley faces the repressed, traumatizing experiences of her childhood, she confronts her and her society’s various interrelationships with the natural world, showing how a suburban upbringing can produce unsatisfactory relationships with both human and non-human nature. In so doing, Cat’s Eye critiques common, urbane conceptions of nature from a point of view that is quintessentially ecocritical. Aside from the obvious environmental concerns vocalized by Elaine’s biologist father, ecological issues are relevant to three other aspects of the novel: Elaine’s early childhood in northern Ontario, her later summer vacations there, and the social pressures and cultural practices that Elaine experiences in suburbia. Through these elements of the narrative, Cat’s Eye articulates some of the fundamental relationships with nature experienced by those living in suburban Canada and seeks to move beyond conventional portrayals of this relationship.

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This comparative examination of Canadian writer Barbara Gowdy’s fiction, specifically the novels Falling Angels (1989), Mister Sandman (1996), The Romantic (2003), and Helpless (2007), and several short stories in We So Seldom Look on Love (1992), expands the study of the feminist grotesque from representations and performances of transgressive bodies to the politics involved in imagining and inhabiting grotesque environments. Gowdy’s fiction makes freaks ordinary through domestic realism, and in so doing her narratives make strangely surreal the “normal” environments of late modernity. By imagining our bodies and environments as grotesque forms — uneven and ungainly, open and porous, incomplete and excessive — Gowdy’s depictions of freaks and their ordinary domestic and suburban environments broadly entail a carnivalesque inversion of normative environments that has social and ecological relevance. The normative home is figured by way of miniaturizing containers that restrict — albeit only partially — gender, sexuality, and physical embodiment to normative practices and symbolically exclude ecological processes in an illusion of self-enclosure. Gowdy’s carnivalesque inversions show ordinary residential environments to be dense with animal lives and deaths, energy flows, and fungal and vegetative growth and decay. The recurring theme of power outages and electricity transmission lines shows seemingly self-contained domestic space supported by an extensive industrial infrastructure, and socially marginal women absurdly imagining themselves responsible for industrial failures in primarily masculine domains. Gowdy’s carnivalesque domestic realism historically situates suburban development, nuclear families, and nuclear weaponry as a particular set of gendered social relations while resisting any reduction of the physical world to an inert background.

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Canada’s tradition of nature poets who are also philosophically astute (or, conversely, philosophical poets who are astute about bioregionality) is long and would include Don McKay, Tim Lilburn, and Jan Zwicky, to name just a few. My own practice of observing and archiving animals, and writing about such archiving practices, an ongoing project called FaunaWatch, has made it clear that nothing about doing so is simple, just as nothing about being the owner-operator of a fleshy body is simple. This essay examines my practice of observation and archiving a bioregional creaturely list as an important critical and creative process, though one that is powered by an acquisitive energy, raising questions about the culture of sighting and “collecting” sights. FaunaWatch, as practice and as project, has increased in complexity precisely because of its humble (and humbling) beginnings, growing as it did out of my intense desire to fix myself in the realities of my geographical location in southwestern Ontario. When a hybrid of scholarly discourse and bioregional presence goes into the woods, it is no real surprise to find the organic impulse of the poem and the biological organism, the animal self and the animal other, undermined by uncertainty.

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Cet article s’intéresse à la représentation de paysages urbains jusqu’alors demeurés peu explorés dans la poésie québécoise contemporaine. En s’appuyant sur les théories du paysage développées entre autres par Alain Roger et Augustin Berque, il montre en quoi les représentations de Montréal sont en cours de déplacement : alors que le dernier quart du XXe siècle s’attachait à décrire le cœur de la métropole, son fourmillement, le brassage des cultures qui le caractérise, depuis le début des années 2000, ce sont d’autres facettes de Montréal qui émergent : les arrière- cours, les ruelles, la banlieue, des lieux marginaux, des quartiers industriels, des bâtisses désaffectées, certains quartiers trépidants de vie la journée, mais vides pendant la nuit. De cette question de la représentation paysagère proprement dite, la réflexion s’achemine ensuite vers deux praxis incontournables du paysage, soit le tourisme – fait sociétal majeur, mais pourtant très peu représenté en littérature – et le reniement de l’urbanité par elle-même – autrement dit lorsque la ville essaie de dissimuler ses traits distinctifs jusqu’à se diluer et perdre son essence. Ces pratiques paysagères conduisent finalement à une réflexion sur le concept de chôra, à la fois paysage et milieu qui valorise les interactions entre le paysage et les êtres qui l’habitent et qu’il habite réciproquement. Cette symbiose ou cette harmonie qu’évoque la chôra parait extrêmement fragile de nos jours.

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This essay revisits one of the foundational settler texts of Canadian literature, Northrop Frye’s “Conclusion” to the Literary History of Canada. It offers a controversial re-reading of Northrop Frye’s infamous “garrison mentality” thesis from the perspective of contemporary eco-criticism, particularly in view of the global crisis of climate change. The essential ecological logic of Frye’s account is that human isolation from nature impedes humanity’s “fullest functioning as a species.” However, the logic of the garrison thesis has been implicitly shared by critics who purport to oppose Frye’s approach; at base, both Frye and his critics assume that human-nature interconnection fosters human potential and creativity. Drawing on a number of prominent environmental biologists and ecocritics, the essay demonstrates that the garrison mentality, in which humans maintain a respectful distance from nature, may be the most ecologically sound response. This opens up a provocative question: “What if the most crucial role for literature . . . is not to fuel and thrive on the individual quest for creative fulfillment and self-understanding, but to harness itself to the task of bringing human aspirations, collectively, within limits?”

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Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy has met with popular acclaim and generated considerable scholarly interest since the 2003 publication of its first volume, Oryx and Crake. The implicit critique of Western capitalism presented in Atwood’s dystopian vision of a post-democratic, post-national, and post-human future seems to offer a wide appeal, particularly at a time of sustained environmental crisis. Instead of evaluating the merits of Atwood’s critique, however, this paper examines the ways in which the speculative future of Oryx and Crake and the warnings it contains are delimited by a problematic Second World paradigm. More specifically, the novel can be read in terms of the wild animal story, a genre first established in late-nineteenth-century Canada that Atwood herself was instrumental in defining as such in her controversial 1972 study Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature. In keeping with the conventions of the wild animal story, boundary crossings in Atwood’s novel engage in indigenizing fantasy. Despite its powerful warning of imminent disaster, Oryx and Crake nevertheless obscures ongoing colonializing acts by privileging a settler subject-position conceived as endangered by the forces of modernity

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The commercial hunting of harp seal pups galvanized animal rights in the 1970s, culminating in the banning of sealskin products in Europe and the curtailment of trade in the United States. The seal in animal rights discourse is a type of object that needs saving in the form of protective measures to keep her safe from the rapacious greed of capitalism. However, in Indigenous discourse, the seal is another relative, a relation whose presence makes all certainties about hierarchy, use-value, moral exemption, and human exceptionalism impossible. This essay re-thinks the figural dimensions of seals in Yupiit and Inuit storytelling practices alongside debates around over-harvesting, competing global interests, and animal rights to develop current activism for environmental justice for both humans and seals in a time of rapid change. I suggest that focusing on practices of care rather than commodity circulation reframes the relationship of humans and seals beyond binary systems of interpretation that make humans subjects (with “culture”) and seals objects (in “nature”). Inuit stories, legal statutes, and environmental conservation rhetoric all appear to be different, if not contradictory, types of narratives. Nevertheless, when read together, they reveal a shared ethics of care for the wellbeing of the seal. This care, I suggest, momentarily frees seals from their entrapment in an economy of use and provides a basis for understanding the North as a lived environment.

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This essay examines how John Steffler’s poetry collection That Night We Were Ravenous (1998) destabilizes the humanist impulse to position the “authentic” subject at the core of ecological concerns by employing a compost aesthetic that enacts the innately fragmented nature of human subjectivity. It contends that, for Steffler, the poem is its own ecosystem, one that sits in precarious balance with the world around it. The poems in this collection are exploratory rather than expository; their attempts to discover the self in nature are as ephemeral, slippery, and paradoxical as the language that gives them life. Instead of declaiming poetry as a resource that will allow a return to a utopian space, Steffler’s ecological poems position the human subject as a composite of usable waste attuned to the precarious chaos of nature.

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Kathleen Winter’s Annabel (2010) tells the story of Wayne Blake, a hermaphrodite born in the village of Croydon Harbour on the southeast Labrador coast. In this land of extremes, Wayne’s body defies classification, and its multiplicity not only signifies “the emptiness of signs” but also unhinges the narratives of the people and the land that come into contact with him. His intersex body defies the social norms of his parents’ societies, the linguistic parameters of self-identification, and the supposed laws of nature by which so many of these characters live their lives. Yet as the novel progresses, almost everyone and everything in this landscape come to share Wayne’s multiplicity. As a result, this article argues, Annabel is an intersex text in which everything is revealed to be more than one thing at any given time, a philosophy of people and places also found in the ecocriticism of Glen A. Love and Lawrence Buell.

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Alors que ses premiers romans remettent en question la notion d’authenticité et promeuvent essentiellement une hybridité ethnique qui associe les nouveaux modes culturels aux impératifs sociétaux d’origine, avec Espèces (2010), Ying Chen s’interroge cette fois sur une forme d’hybridité détachée de toute classification ethnique : l’intervalle au sein duquel humanité et animalité se rencontrent occasionnellement. La relation entre animalité et humanité constitue l’épicentre de la fiction Espèces dont l’intrigue est envisagée par une narratrice qui se métamorphose provisoirement en femme-chatte. Ying Chen place cet être hybride à la croisée des philosophies nietzschéenne, bergsonienne et derridienne, et s’engage dans une déconstruction des frontières manichéennes qui opposent traditionnellement l’humain à l’animal. Cette déconstruction ne suppose pas la destruction totale des frontières en question, ni ne préconise l’hermétisme de ces mêmes séparations. Chez Ying Chen, la frontière qui sépare l’humain de l’animal est envisagée en tant que paradigme récursif et, de par sa porosité, reconnaît à la fois altérité et contiguïté. Avec Espèces, l’auteure élabore une nouvelle anthropologie qui oscille entre rupture et contiguïté, et tente de rendre compte d’une frontière perméable à travers laquelle s’invitent l’humain et l’animal. Ainsi, Ying Chen entreprend essentiellement de rendre compte de la perméabilité ponctuelle d’une frontière existante à travers laquelle s’invitent parfois l’humain et le non-humain, et nous propose de reconnaître l’animalité en nous et de nous en séparer à la fois.

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This essay examines Helen Humphreys’s 2004 novel Wild Dogs, arguing that the narrative offers resistant responses to the seamless models of ecology and economy that are currently articulated by neoliberal culture. The often difficult lives of the canine and human misfits that populate the novel, alongside their sometimes unexpected actions and decisions, call attention to the inadequacy of ecological and economic narratives that would promise full and perfect, if cutthroat, functionality. The novel not only illustrates the socioeconomic and epistemic ill effects of a zero-sum neoliberal ideology of economic efficiency, but perhaps more importantly for situating neoliberalism within an ecocritical frame, the novel also interrogates the ecological dog-eat-dog story of “nature” that so often serves as the alibi for today’s spiralling and violent economic designations of biopolitical disposability. Both dogs and humans in Wild Dogs embody rankling remainders of the common-sense predator-prey binary; in the process, they initiate forms of care and relationship unaccounted for by the speculative presumptions of neoliberal biopolitics.

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This article discusses the relationship between literary form and contemporary ecological anxiety in Douglas Coupland’s novel Generation A. Coupland’s speculative fiction envisions a possible future in the wake of Colony Collapse Disorder, but the more generalized eco-anxiety the novel explores is applicable to a number of contemporary environmental issues ranging from climate change to ocean acidification. I argue that Coupland’s novel invites readers to consider the problem of representing ecological problems characterized by global scale, temporal uncertainty, and multiple origins. I then explore how Coupland responds to these challenges by stretching form in two directions. First, he juxtaposes and recycles a series of stories in a manner that capitalizes on lateral, shortened forms of attention, leading readers to detect larger patterns of significance within a database of what might initially seem like insignificant or banal details. Second, he cultivates the development of a form of “hive mind” among characters and readers that stretches ideas of personhood beyond the corporeal boundaries of the individual subject. The latter opens new possibilities for conceiving of a collective, networked mode of political agency in the era of social media and global scale effects.