Under Serious Threat: Representations of Predatory Mammals in the Literary Nonfiction of Sid Marty, Charlie Russell and John Vaillant

• Main Author: Emery, Tempest
• Other Authors: Banting, Pamela
• Format: Master Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: Graduate Studies 2015
• Subjects: Literature; Literature > Canadian (English); Ecocriticism; Predator; Animal Studies; Kamchatka
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/11023/2193; https://doi.org/10.11575/PRISM/28555

Drawing on the fields of ecocriticism and animal studies, this research engages with three examples of creative nonfiction to examine literary representations of other-than-human beings that are categorized as predators. This thesis examines the treatment of grizzly bears and black bears in Sid Marty's The Black Grizzly of Whiskey Creek, grizzly bears in Charlie Russell's Grizzly Heart: Living Without Fear Among the Brown Bears of Kamchatka, and tigers in John Vaillant's The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival. This project investigates the extent to which the concept of the predator is an anthropocentric reflection of human fears and analyzes new forms of ethics and politics regarding the human-bear relationship. It also demonstrates that human and other-than-human beings are more profoundly connected than conventional Western paradigms acknowledge. Reconsidering human perceptions of so-called predators creates opportunities to alter and improve our interactions with them.