Looking at Animals, Encountering Mystery: The Wild Animal Stories of Ernest Thompson Seton and Charles G.D. Roberts

Critics who have analyzed the animal stories of Ernest Thompson Seton and Charles G.D. Roberts in the context of the Darwinian revolution have focussed on how evolutionary theory transformed understanding of animal psychology and competition in nature. Such scholars have disagreed over the extent to which the two writers accepted Darwinism or were realistic in their representations. With some significant exceptions, however, the focus on animals per se has obscured the extent to which Seton and Roberts were also speculating, in Darwin's wake, about the moral nature of the cosmos and the meaning of human and animal life within it. The author explores how Seton's religious language and tendency to allegory reveal his belief that both human beings and animals partake of the divine spirit of the cosmos; while Roberts, focussing on chance deaths amidst the beauty of nature, can affirm neither the moral goodness of nature nor its purely material reality.