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Ecocritical studies of the Belgian author Maurice Maeterlinck have focused primarily on his essays on social insects and on the mechanisms of flowers while disregarding the importance of what the writer considered man’s only non-human ally. By focusing on the alliance between dogs and their owner in Maeterlinck’s work, this article argues that the figure of the dog fits within the writer’s desire to re-enchant cultivated nature. It first looks at how the author intertwines autobiography and animal biography to create a narrative of itinerancy and homecoming. This section considers the symbolic meaning of homecoming, but also its material conditions, which are inextricably linked to the notion of class. Secondly, the article examines the affective meaning with which the writer imbues the human-animal alliance and places the love that the dogs feel for their owner in the context of Maeterlinck’s fin-de-siècle fascination for mysticism.

In 2011, Will Kymlicka and Sue Donaldson published Zoopolis, a text considered a classic of the animal rights cause. For several decades, a growing number of works of fiction have also invited us to rethink our ties with other animals, notably by criticising anthropocentrism, thereby demonstrating a certain ecological consciousness. This is the case with two Belgian authors, Caroline Lamarche (Nous sommes à la lisière) and Gil Bartholeyns (Deux kilos deux). However, while the former uses an eco-sensitive writing style to stage emotional relationships between humans and non-humans, in the latter’s oeuvre, which deals with animal production, emotions are repressed and relationships are purely utilitarian. Through the analysis of these two works, this article proposes a critique of the philosophy of the living world (philosophie du vivant), which is currently very popular in the Francophone world, and also highlights the role of emotions in rethinking interspecies relationships.

The monkey, due to its biological proximity to humankind, occupies a distinctive position within the bestiary that features in pictorial representations and narratives, particularly across the Western world. The motif of the singerie (“monkey trick” or “monkey business”, the term often referring to art depicting monkeys aping human behaviour), which experienced considerable popularity during the early modern period, finds a peculiar continuance in the nineteenth century, in the illustrations of Jean-Jacques Grandville, and, subsequently, in the twenty-first century, being a central figure in Pierre Huyghe’s film, Untitled (Human Mask). These two artists, employing fundamentally different methodologies and operating across distinct aesthetic domains, appear to offer a critical perspective on the unseen facets of the singerie. What originally constituted a purely parodic form – a species of ironic engagement with the concept of vanitas – is transformed by them into a rigorous analytical instrument and a mechanism for decentring the human perspective. This apparatus is ultimately devoted to the depiction of an alternative conception of humanity.

In Jean-François Beauchemin’s Le Jour des corneilles (2004) and its animated adaptation by Jean-Christophe Dessaint (2012), a feral child raised in the forest encounters ghostly presences that blur the boundaries between the human and the more-than-human. Oscillating between coming-of-age story and philosophical fable, Beauchemin’s work – where the bird is a recurring symbol, as in Le Roitelet or Archives de la joie – invites a reading through Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of “becoming-animal”, understood as an ascetic and creative process leading beyond subjectivity. This article examines how the novel’s poetic language and the film’s animation aesthetics construct an animal experience grounded in non-anthropocentric affectivity rather than human introspection. It also explores how Dessaint’s adaptation, following a directorial transition from Serge Élissalde, reinterprets Beauchemin’s Québécois zoopoetics through a French lens. The dialogue between these two cultural perspectives reveals a dynamic reconfiguration of otherness in contemporary Francophone representations of the animal.

This article argues that Mireille Gagné’s novel Le Lièvre d’Amérique (2020) uses a woman-hare metamorphosis to explore emotional hybridity, or the interlacing of human and non-human emotions. Through close readings of the protagonist’s evolution, the predator-prey motif, and the fusion of human-animal perspectives, this study examines how Gagné’s engagement with zoopoetics reconfigures emotions as shared and environmentally situated forces rather than purely interior states. Drawing on affect theory and literary animal studies, this article traces how certain emotions function as symptoms of neoliberal alienation and ecological precarity, registering damaged relations to habitat and more-than-human others. The novel’s alternation between subjective viewpoints, ethological descriptions, and fragmented temporal markers draws the reader’s attention away from anthropomorphic projection toward reciprocal, if asymmetrical, interspecies synergy. Le Lièvre d’Amérique ultimately reframes care as an interspecies practice while contesting neoliberal commodification of bodies and emotions. A brief coda on Gagné’s Bois de fer (2022) extends this argument by showing how emotional hybridity and ecological emotions become key sites where northern Francophone fiction imagines multispecies solidarity amid climate crisis.

This article explores the intersection of animal emotionality and Indigenous maternal experience in the literary works of Virginia Pesemapeo Bordeleau. Through the theoretical framework termed emotional eco-maternity, an onto-epistemological praxis of care situated at the nexus of affect theory, Indigenous cosmology, and feminist ecology, the study examines how Bordeleau’s Indigenous perspective challenges Western epistemological boundaries separating human and animal emotional lives. While contemporary environmental humanities and affective neuroscience have only recently begun acknowledging animal emotions, Indigenous literature, particularly that authored by women, has long articulated complex understandings of interspecies emotional connection through maternal perspectives. Focusing on Bordeleau’s works L’Enfant hiver, De rouge et de blanc, and Ourse bleue, this article demonstrates how the author constructs narrative spaces in which maternal experience serves as a privileged ground for recognising and representing animal subjectivity. The framework of emotional eco-maternity reveals how these texts resist the colonial erasure of both animal emotion and Indigenous maternal practices. By portraying motherhood as an emotional ecology transcending species boundaries, Bordeleau’s writing performs a form of decolonial resistance that reconnects Indigenous maternal identity with “more-than-human” kinship networks. Ultimately, this study contributes to zoopoetic and decolonial literary criticism by reclaiming Indigenous perspectives on interspecies emotional relations that challenge hierarchical Western divisions of being and affirm reciprocal ties amongst humans, animals, and ecological systems.

This article explores the similarities between Yasunari Kawabata’s Snow Country and Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. The analysis focuses on the presented world and its space-time properties, the poetics of description, and how these elements transform in the perceptions of the main characters, Shimamura and Hans Castorp. The article also compares the demeanors of both characters, their attitudes toward their places of residence, their relationships with the women they encounter, their lifestyles, and their perspectives on the social world and human activity within it. The author examines how the dynamic between the male observer and the observed woman contributes to the narrative of both works and relates to themes of beauty, love, life, and death. The text applies Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope and Foucault’s notion of heterotopia.

This essay compares two novels from the interwar period: The Magic Mountain (1924) by Thomas Mann and Farewell to Autumn (1927) by Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz. The author treats these works as both period documents and parodies of the Bildungsroman, given the incompatibility of the traditional Enlightenment genre with times of crisis. The failure of the educational process in both novels gives rise to decadence, although both works critique the life model they depict, with the narrators’ irony serving as a key vehicle for this critique. Both writers challenge Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophy, accusing him of being overly optimistic about the problem of decadence–a phenomenon that, in the author’s view, can be linked to the concept of “behavioral sink” developed by John B. Calhoun.

The article focuses on two translated excerpts from Edward Young’s (1683 – 1765) The Complaint: or, Night-Thoughts on Life, Death, Immortality (1742 – 1745), which Bohuslav Tablic (1769 – 1832) included in his occasional poems Popelu... Alžběty Brodské oBěTováno [To the ashes of Alžběta Brodská oBlaTed] (1803) and Elegie na smrt D. P. Pavla Ježoviče... [An elegy to the death of D. P. Pavol Ježovič] (1807). It identifies connections between Young’s poem Night Thoughts and the genre of epicedium and shows how Tablic incorporated passages from the English poem into his own occasional works. The study complements existing research on Tablic’s translations by identifying specific passages from Young’s original that Tablic translated, considering their possible English and German sources, and examining how these translations relate to the epicediums to which they are attached. Through comparative textological and stylistic analysis, it characterises Tablic’s methods of translation and reveals several shifts in expression and meaning in his translations. The findings of a comparative reading of the original and the translation point to the need to compare Tablic’s translations with English originals and to further consider the interliterary connections of his work.

In the letter through which Dungal demonstrates to Charlemagne the mathematical rationality of the two eclipses of sun of 810 there is no reference to the allegorical model of the universe promoted in patristics from Clement of Alexandria to Cosmas Indicopleustes. Inspired by In Somnium Scipionis, where Macrobius synthesises the astronomic knowledge of the Greco-Roman world, it shows that during the Carolingian period the pre-Christian cosmological model, which proves that we are in mid first European Renaissance. The originality of the letter consists in the simple answer of actuality that Dungal suggests to the emperor: the predictable periodicity of the astronomic events proves that their association with tragic moments of the personal life is related to superstition, namely to pseudo-science. In the following lines, I propose an analysis of the text of this letter from the perspective of the sources, of structure and of pre-Christian cosmology elements.