Beierl, Barbara Hardy

Dr. Barbara Hardy is an Independent Scholar currently affiliated with the New Hampshire Humanities Council. She received her Ph.D from Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. She has taught there as well as Harvard University, and the State and City University of New York systems.

Empathetic Literary Analysis of Jack London's the Call of the Wild: Understanding Life From an Animal's Point of View

2012 0-7734-2934-4
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 characters can gain empathy from their audience there is a higher likelihood that the readers will have a positive response to the story. This book discusses how Jack London creates animal characters that form an empathetic bond with his readers. When readers can understand the inner, mental states of characters, they become motivated to form emotional attachments with them.