Title Page; Copyright Page; Table of Contents; Foreword; Acknowledgments; Abstract; Introduction; Chapter 1: Philosophical Foundations and Psychological Underpinnings of Empathy; Chapter 2: Reading As an Empatheic Activity; Chapter 3: Enabling Attitudinal Change through Empathetic Literary Analysis; Chapter 4: The Empathic Reader: Analyzing Jack London's The Call of the Wild; Developmental Stage 1: Buck's Odyssey from Innocence to Experience; Developmental Stage 2: Buck's Apprenticeship; Developmental Stage 3: The Call of the Wild
Chapter 5: Humane Narrative Fiction, Biophilia, and the Interspecies BondBibliography; Index
Summary
Numerous tomes have been written about Jack London's The Call of the Wild. This is the first one to talk about the dog Buck's perspective in the novel. Beierl takes an empathetic approach to discussing the domestication of Buck in the story to use this novel as a platform for building empathetic relationships with animals. Very few scholarly works discuss literature from the perspective of an animal, and this one attempts to bring a fresh perspective at an old novel by theorizing empathetically with the characters, which plays a critical role in narrative-based responses to the novel. If chara
