This volume is the first comprehensive guide to current research on animals, animality, and human-animal relations in literature. To reflect the history of literary animal studies to date, its primary focus is literary prose and poetry in English, while also accommodating emergent discussions of the full range of media and contexts with which literary studies engages, especially film and critical theory. User-friendly language, references, even suggestions for further readings are included to help newcomers to the field understand how it has taken shape primarily through recent decades. To further aid teachers, sections are organized by conventions of periodization, and chapters address a range of canonical and popular texts. Bookended by sections devoted to the field’s conceptual foundations and new directions, the volume is designed to set an agenda for literary animal studies for decades to come.
Author(s): Susan McHugh, Robert McKay, John Miller
Series: Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Year: 2021
Language: English
Pages: 638
City: Cham
Acknowledgements
Contents
Notes on Contributors
List of Figures
Introduction: Towards an Animal-Centred Literary History
Works Cited
Part I: Theoretical Underpinnings
The Exception and the Norm: Dimensions of Anthropocentrism
Works Cited
Recommended Further Reading
Metaphor, Metonymy, More-Than-Anthropocentric. The Animal That Therefore I Read (and Follow)
Literature and Animals
Animal as Metaphor: The Symptomatic Tradition
Animal as Metonymy: Surface Readings
Dividing…
… and Uniting
Following the Animal for “More-Than-Anthropocentric” Worlds
Works Cited
Recommended Further Reading
Narratology Beyond the Human: Self-Narratives and Inter-Species Identities
Storytelling and Selfhood Beyond the Human
Self-Narratives in the Third Person: Modeling the Emergence of a Biocentric Story of Self
Self-Narratives in the First Person: Fictional Memoirs and Inter-Species Becoming
Concluding Remarks
Works Cited
Recommended Further Reading
An(im)alogical Thinking: Contemporary Black Literature and the Dreaded Comparison
A Slavery More Ancient
The Wisdom of a Cat
Reframing the Door
Works Cited
Recommended Further Reading
We Are Not in This World Alone: On Drawing Close, Animal Stories, and a Multispecies Sense of Place
Introduction: The Animals in Our Stories
Storytelling, Race, and Animals
Precarious Homes and Animals as Fellow Migrants
Multispecies Migration and Belonging
Conclusion: An Animal Storying of Place
Works Cited
Recommended Further Reading
Part II: Medieval Literature
A Community of Exiles: Whale and Human Domains in Old English Poetry
The Thematic Interests of Old English Poetry
The Franks Casket
Beyond the Franks Casket
Works Cited
Recommended Further Reading
An Ontological Turn for the Medieval Books of Beasts: Environmental Theory from Premodern to Postmodern
From Taxonomising to Ontologising
Dualism, Analogism, and Animism
Formal Heterogeneity and Environmental Theory
Works Cited
Recommended Further Reading
Chaucer, Lydgate, and the Half-Heard Nightingale
The Apparitional Voice
Lydgate’s “Seying”: The Polysemous Refrain
Chaucer’s Criseyde: Embodied Dreams
Conclusion
Works Cited
Recommended Further Reading
Huntings of the Hare: The Medieval and Early Modern Poetry of Imperiled Animals
Works Cited
Recommended Further Reading
Part III: Early Modern Literature
Human, Animal, and Metamorphic Becomings
Works Cited
Recommended Further Reading
Sheep, Beasts, and Knights: Fugitive Alterity in Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene Book VI, and The Shepheardes Calender
Animal Oppositions
Life Beyond Polarities
Works Cited
Recommended Further Reading
My Palfrey, Myself: Toward a Queer Phenomenology of the Horse-Human Bond in Henry V and Beyond
Shape
Motion
Works Cited
Recommended Further Reading
What Can Beast Fables Do in Literary Animal Studies? Ben Jonson’s Volpone and the Prehumanist Human
The Beast Fable
The Paragon of Animals
Old and New Continuums
Works Cited
Recommended Further Reading
Part IV: Literature of the Eighteenth Century
“Real” Animals and the Eighteenth-Century Literary Imagination
I
II
III
IV
Conclusion
Works Cited
Recommended Further Reading
Mary Leapor’s Creatureliness in “An Essay on Woman” and Other Poems
Who Was Mary Leapor?
What Does Creaturely Mean?
How Do We Know that Leapor Is Creaturely?
The Creaturely Played Out in Front of Her: “Silvia and the Bee” (1748)
The Creaturely and the Comic: “Corydon. Phillario Or, Mira’s Picture. A Pastoral” (1751)
Speaking for Itself: “The Inspir’d Quill. Occasion’d by a Gift of Crow-pens” (1748)
Is the Labouring-Class Poet Inherently Creaturely?
Works Cited
Recommended Further Reading
Poetics of the Hunt: Re-reading Agency and Re-thinking Ecology in William Somerville’s The Chase
Works Cited
Recommended Further Reading
Part V: Romantic Literature
Beyond Symbolism: The Rights and Biopolitics of Romantic Period Animals
Works Cited
Recommended Further Reading
Bad Dog: The Dark Side of Misbehaving Animals
The Mysteries of Udolpho
Belinda
“Christabel”
“Darkness”
Works Cited
Recommended Further Reading
Why Animals Matter in Jane Austen
“Deep-Rooted Prejudices”: Speciesism and Patriarchy
“I Must Be a Brute Indeed”: Pug and Other Animals in Mansfield Park
“The Lowest and Last”: Conclusion
Works Cited
Further Recommended Readings
John Keats and the Sound of Autumn: Reading Poetry in a Time of Extinction
II
III
Works Cited
Recommended Further Reading
Cooper’s Animal Offences: The Confusion of Species in Last of the Mohicans
Works Cited
Recommended Further Reading
Part VI: Victorian Literature
Jane Eyre and Tess Durbeyfield at the Human/Animal Border
Works Cited
Recommended Further Reading
Animals and Nonsense: Edward Lear’s Menagerie
Nonsense and the Critical Tradition
Natural History
Animal Studies and Nonsense
An Anti-Colonial Bestiary
Works Cited
Recommended Further Reading
Intimacy, Objectification, and Inter/Intra-Species Relations in Victorian Animal Autobiographies
Anthropocentrism in Depictions of Inter-and Intra-Species Relations
Critical Anthropomorphism: “Oh! If People Knew What a Comfort to Horses a Light Hand Is”
Conclusion: Rethinking Inter-Species Relationships
Works Cited
Recommended Further Reading
How Not to Eat: Vegetarian Polemics in Victorian India
Vegetarian Absurdity, Vegetarian Cruelty
Sacred Cows and Bovine Advocacy
The Vegetarian Witness
Conclusion
Works Cited
Recommended Further Reading
Part VII: Modernist Literature
Modernist Animals and Bioaesthetics
Works Cited
Recommended Further Reading
Vivisection in Modernist Culture and Popular Fiction, 1890–1945
Works Cited
Recommended Further Reading
Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein: Two Modernist Women Writing as Dogs
Works Cited
Recommended Further Reading
Kingship, Kinship and the King of Beasts in Early Southern African Novels
Works Cited
Recommended Further Reading
Animals Inside: Creatureliness in Dezső Kosztolányi’s Skylark and Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life
The Arc and the Limit
Ugly
x = x
A Note on Gesture
Works Cited
Recommended Further Reading
Part VIII: Contemporary Literature
Speculative Humanisms: Postwar Universalism and the Question of the Animal
Interstellar Cosmopolitanism in The Left Hand of Darkness
Undoing the Human: SF, Cosmopolitan Humanism, and Species Difference
Works Cited
Recommended Further Reading
CanLit’s Ossiferous Fictions: Animal Bones and Fossils in Margaret Atwood’s Life Before Man and Carol Shields’s The Stone Diaries
Animal Bones and Fossils in Canadian Literature
Ossiferous Sex
Empirical Absences in the Settler-Colonial Imaginary
Works Cited
Recommended Further Reading
Returning to the Animals’ Gaze: Reflective Readings of Lionesses Marah and Sekhmet
From the Gaze to Embodiment
Indigenous Knowledges and the Colonial Imaginary
Postcolonial Realities
Works Cited
Recommended Further Reading
“Without the Right Words It’s Hard to Retain Clarity”: Speculative Fiction and Animal Narrative
Works Cited
Recommended Further Reading
Jesmyn Ward’s Dog Bite: Mississippi Love and Death Stories
Works Cited
Recommended Further Reading
Shared and Hefted Lives in Twenty-First-Century Shepherds’ Calendars
The Shepherd’s Calendar
Pyramids
Becoming-With the Land
Being Alongside
Conclusion
Works Cited
Recommended Further Reading
Part IX: New Directions
The Biopolitics of Animal Love: Two Settler Stories
I. Animal Lovers
II. The Wolfdog and the Love-Master
III. Saved by the Grace of Dog
IV. Conclusion
Works Cited
Recommended Further Reading
Companion Prosthetics: Avatars of Animality and Disability
Charting Prosthetics
From Agency to Animacies with Companion Species
Charting Animacies in Avatar
Companion Prosthetics
Works Cited
Recommended Further Reading
Denizen Habitations: Spaces of Solidarity in Recent South Asian Fiction
Denizens and Their Spaces
The Precarity and Promise of Denizenship
The Refusal of Solidarity in Vivek Shanbhag’s Ghachar Ghochar
Habitations Outside the Grid in Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness
Works Cited
Recommended Further Reading
Plagues, Poisons, and Dead Rats: A Multispecies History
The Colonial Fantasy
The Fantasy of Technoscience
The Fantasy of Containment
Works Cited
Recommended Further Reading
Last Chance to See: Extinction in Literary Animal Studies and the Environmental Humanities
Extinction and Global Capital
Last Chance to See as Anti-Capitalist Comedy
Technoculture and the Poetics of Encounter
Works Cited
Recommended Further Reading
Index
