Animal–Human Entanglements in the Canadian Wild Animal Stories of Charles G. D. Roberts
Bibliographic record
Abstract
One of the most inventive and distinctive formal and generic interventions into modern writings about animals was the advent of the realistic wild animal story at the turn-of-the-century. As Adrian Hunter has pointed out, it was in the 1890s that ‘a three-way alignment between realism, the short story, and various forms of cultural radicalism and avant-gardism came into being,’ signalling the advent of a new modernist moment. The wild animal story, resultantly, demonstrates the current renegotiation of modernist literary and cultural contours with its formal and thematic preoccupations. Pioneered by Canadian writers Sir Charles G.D. Roberts and Ernest Thompson Seton, this unique genre interwove fiction with accounts of animal behaviour based on developments in animal psychology, cognitive ethology, and Darwinian theory. This chapter analyses how these authors use established narrative strategies such as naming, perspective, and narration, as well as more porous and prolific techniques such as identification and relationality. Roberts’s positioning of this genre as a means of reaching an ‘enlightened’ and ‘spiritual’ understanding of the ‘world of wonder’ opened by animal psychology, however, also raises political, cultural, and ethical questions about settler-colonialism. This chapter throws open the geographical, temporal, and aesthetic boundaries of these late nineteenth into twentieth century works to interrogate the unique contribution that the wild animal story provides to broader discussions of nonhuman animals in modernity.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".