Oregon Historical Quarterly

 Reviews The cover sports an endorsement of the book as “a delicious case study in human obsession and the fuzzy border between science and pseudoscience.”In truth,it falls short of anything resembling such. The treatment is myopic. The occasional glimmer of insight or objectivity is promptly snuffed out as the author retreats to the safety of naiveté. D. Jeffrey Meldrum Idaho State University Wolves and the Wolf Myth in American Literature by S.K. Robisch University of Nevada Press, Reno, 2009. Notes, bibliography, index. 464 pages. $49.95 cloth. $29.95 paper. Mired as they are in origin stories, mythology, children’s stories,our pet dogs,and casual daily metaphors, wolves themselves are rarely seen. Real wolves, that is, the ones S.K. Robisch calls the “corrective entities to the texts attempting to depict them” (p. 16). In a groundbreaking model of ecocriticism, the author attempts to disentangle this real wolf from its many guises in American literature. In so doing, Robisch shows how wolf books have helped shape, and been shaped by, American ecological consciousness. Robischsetsouttoprovesevenclaims,many of which run contrary to traditional literary theory. He claims, among other things, that the wolf is a major literary figure, that considerations of wolves take on regional distinctions, that the American wolf myth is largely borrowed from other cultures,and that race,class, and gender are subcategories to the biosphere — in other words, that cultural thought is a subset of ecological thought, rather than the other way around. As a book about wolf books, Wolves and the Wolf Myth in American Literature is a daunting review of prose from prehistory to the beginning of the twenty-first century — both fiction and nonfiction, mostly book-length works with some notable short stories and essays, as well as children’s books, mythology, and even some poems. Robisch delineates the real wolf from the “world wolf”— all the various representations of wolves in literature.This“world wolf”can be either corporeal (a portrayal as close to biological knowledge as possible),ghost (the imagined wolf, as “totemic, ethereal, unconscious, symbolic images”), or some combination of both (p.17).It is the ghost wolf that is most prevalent in literature,the one that is“the human imagination making of the wolf what the mind wants or needs for its own comfort, reassurance, or even recreational challenge” (p. 17). Part 1 provides insights into how the wolf book has affected, and been affected by, the sociopolitical climate of the times as well as by the level of scientific knowledge of real wolves.Books that Robisch claims significantly changed the world wolf image include The Wolves of Mount McKinley, Never CryWolf, and OfWolves and Men.His discussion continues to present-day texts, including numerous books about the Yellowstone wolves. Parts 2 and 3 delve deeper into the ghost wolf, taking a new look at such well-known texts as White Fang and investigating Nordic, Greek, and Native American mythologies, as well as more current texts that make ample use of the ghost wolf. Robisch pays particular attention to the effects of gender,class,and race on imagined wolves.Part 4 focuses on Cormac McCarthy’s The Crossing,which Robisch claims is the best fictional representation of the real wolf to date — but is still, he reminds us, just one fictional story about one particular wolf. Wolves and the Wolf Myth in American Literature is dense with information,but Robisch is a companionable, disarming, and clearthinking guide. While it might be most useful for those who study and teach literature,it will also engage those who wish to understand how  OHQ vol. 111, no. 1 stories function in a culture, the power they have over reality, and the responsibility every story-teller has to his or her subject — particularly when that subject is nonhuman. Thisbookfulfillsthepromiseof ecocriticism by deftly including interdisciplinary information so that the real wolf corrects“our assumptions and fantasies about it,” thus helping us reconcile our imagined wolves with both the wolves themselves and our behaviors towards them (p. i). As Robisch writes,“when we put a wolf in a story, the story at that point must be responsible to the wolf” (p. 11). The real...