Alice and the Wolf: Exploring Dennis Danvers’ Wilderness

Dennis Danvers’ Wilderness, published in 1991, is a work of popular North American fiction that centres upon a reworking of the traditional Western idea of the ‘werewolf’. In this novel Danvers transports the werewolf from the conventional role of villain to heroine, and draws attention to ecological issues intrinsically implicated with this mythological figure. More than simply a romantic fantasy and thriller, Wilderness is a novel that explores the dynamism of the human-nature relationship and challenges certain anthropocentric assumptions that continue to dominate contemporary Western thought. In this paper I will be engaging with Danvers’ Wilderness in order to investigate the ecological issues raised in this work and, more specifically, interrogate the construction of the human/nature binary.