Description
This book, Victorians and Their Animals: Beast on a Leash, investigates the notion that British Victorians did see themselves as naturally dominant species over other humans and over animals. They conscientiously, hegemonically were determined to rule those beneath them and the animal within themselves albeit with varying degrees of success and failure. The articles in this collection apply posthuman and other theories, including queer, postcolonialism, deconstruction, and Marxism, in their exploration of Victorian attitudes toward animals. They study the biopolitical relationships between human and nonhuman animals in several key Victorian literary works. Some of this book’s chapters deal with animal ethics and moral aesthetics. Also being studied is the representation of animals in several Victorian novels as narrative devices to signify class status and gender dynamics, either to iterate socially acceptable mores or to satirize hypocrisy or breach of behavior or to voice social protest. All of the chapters analyse the interdependence of people and animals during the nineteenth century.
Table of Contents
List of Figures
Preface and Acknowledgments
Introduction: "Beast on a Leash"
BRENDA AYRES
1 "Gaskell’s Activism and Animal Agency"
BRENDA AYRES
2 "Old and New Beef: Caring for Animals in Household Words"
LIAM YOUNG
3 "George Eliot’s Use of Horses in Measuring the Moral Maturity of Characters in Her Novels"
CONSTANCE M. FULMER
4 "Pigs in Great Expectations: Class, Dehumanization, and Marxist Animal Studies"
JESSICA KUSKEY
5 "Ants, Insects, and Automatons: Classifying Hardy’s Creatures in The Return of the Native"
ANNA WEST
6 "It’s Raining Cats and Dogs in George Eliot’s Novels"
BRENDA AYRES
7 "A Fine Kettle of Fish: Cultural (and Culinary) Preservation in Anglo-Jewish Ghetto Stories"
LINDSAY KATZIR
8 "Gendered Metamorphoses in Richard Marsh’s The Beetle and the Natural History Museum"
PANDORA SYPEREK
9 "The ‘Animality’ of Speech and Translation in The Jungle Books"
CHRISTIE HARNER
Notes on Contributors
Index
