Delving Into a World of Non-Human Experience: Unnatural Narrative and Ecological Critique of Chen Yingsong's The Last Dance of a Leopard

Abstract As a rejoinder to Erin James, this article tries to bridge the divide between narrative theory and ecocriticism. From a dual perspective of unnatural narratology and ecocriticism, it approaches contemporary Chinese animal narrative fiction and Chen Yingsong's The Last Dance of a Leopard in particular. Through its unnatural narrative form featuring such a dead nonhuman narrator as leopard, the novel transports readers to a world of solitude to convey a sense of what it is like to be an extinctive animal. Revisiting and underscoring the tension of the human and nonhuman divide, the novel urges readers to adopt an ecological attitude confronting anthropocentricism and to reconsider human–animal relations.