An Interpretation Of The Call Of The Wild And Kekexili Wolf From The Perspective Of Ecocriticism

With the development of the industrial revolution, the ecological crisis becomes more and more serious. At the same time, the scholars at home and abroad unprecedentedly pay great attention to the ecological literature. Jack London(1876-1916) is a famous American writer in the twentieth century, he is regarded as a naturalistic and realistic writer and he is a prolific writer as well. His classical work The Call of the Wild, published in 1903, brings him the everlasting reputation. The work becomes one of the research focuses in the recent years because of its ecological consciousness. This novel presents Jack London’s concern for animals and the earth.He criticizes the people who enslave and maltreat the animals and he also criticizes those people who exploit the earth crazily in order to achieve their dreams of being rich. Chinese writer Du Guanghui(1954-) is one of the few ecological writers in China. His representative work Kekexili Wolf was published in 2010. In this novel, he probes into the ecological ethics of the Tibetan culture and conveys his ecological thoughts, which arouse the ecological literary lovers’ interests. This novel wins him numerous awards and it is collected by the Australian library. Though they are written in different periods, countries and cultures, these two works express the two authors’ ecological ideas.There are countless researches about Jack London and his works. So far, the researchers at home and abroad have interpreted The Call of the Wild from extensive perspectives, such as Naturalism, Darwinism, Comparative study, the theme,ecocriticism and so on. Kekexili Wolf is one of the famous works written by Chinese modern writer Du Guanghui. The researchers about this novel and its author are relatively scarce. The author of this thesis finds that there are few studies on The Call of the Wild and KekeXili Wolf from the perspective of ecological criticism by parallel comparative method. With ecocriticism as the theoretical framework, this thesis compares and contrasts these two works. Through the research, the author of the thesis wishes to get a more comprehensive understanding of these two authors’ ecological views and to reveal that Du Guanghui’s views is a sublimation of Jack London’s ecological awareness.This thesis is divided into five parts: Introduction, Chapter One, Chapter Two,Chapter Three and Conclusion.The introductory part introduces the main content of The Call of the Wild and Kekexili Wolf and their authors, and summarizes the literature review of the two novels and the research purpose of this thesis.Chapters One to Three focus on the analysis and interpretation of these two novels from the perspective of ecocriticism.Chapter One mainly analyzes the similar ecological ideas in the two works,including the criticism of anthropocentrism and the harmonious relationship between human and nature in the two works.Chapter Two explores the different ecological themes in the two works from the following three aspects: the reverence for life, the ecological consciousness and ecological responsibility and the value of ecological aesthetics of nature.Chapter Three compares and contrasts the two authors’ ecological concerns in their novels.The last part is the conclusion: the similar themes make the two novels have academic value of comparative studies. Both of the two works embody the authors’ ecological views, but the author Du Guanghui not only inherits and develops Jack London’s ecological views, but also shows Chinese unique way of thinking to solve the ecological crisis.