Introduction

Abstract

Postcolonial environmentalism, in its cultural studies or literary mode, seeks to critique Westernized representations of nature. This study takes an influential environmental concept—wilderness—and a body of contemporary narratives to examine the various transformations of understandings of nature as they are transposed to Australia and Canada. The dominant idea of wilderness as it is perpetuated from the United States undergoes a crucial metamorphosis, even when transposed to these cultural neighbors. The narratives change, from those in a masculinized, revitalizing, perhaps even trivialized, self-discovery vein to stories of defeat, dispossession, and threat, challenging myths of self and myths of nation. Environmentalist in its concern for representations of nature, postcolonialist in its critique of post-settler society, this study adapts two bodies of criticism to redress ways of thinking of and thinking through difference, be it toward human or nonhuman others and otherness.