ABSTRACT
Chapter 4 turns to the construction of the wilderness and the wild. The wildlife or animal film, it argues, becomes a response to global ecoprecarity, a visual museum of disappearing life forms, even as it emphasizes the precariousness of all life forms. Wilderness and wildlife films, including texts such as Sean Penn’s Into the Wild and Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man , generate a carnal geography of the world, focusing on the sheer sense of the bodily/fleshly, the embodied and the mortal, located within specific settings. The chapter then turns to the feral in contemporary culture. The wild is, in such cases, primarily the feral. It studies feral children and the postnatural wilderness common to late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century texts, from The Jungle Book to novels such as Jean Craighead George’s Julie of the Wolves , Karen Hesse’s The Music of Dolphins , Jane Yolen’s Children of the Wolf (1984, reprinted as The Wolf Girls, 2001), memoirs like that of Marina Chapman and Julia Fullerton-Batten’s project, ‘Feral Children’ with its photographic staging of feral children in history.
