Animals And Their Children In Victorian Culture (perspectives On The Non-human In Literature And Culture)

Whether a secularized morality, biblical worldview, or unstated set of mores, the Victorian period can and always will be distinguished from those before and after for its pervasive sense of the "proper way" of thinking, speaking, doing, and acting. Animals in literature taught Victorian children how to be behave. If you are a postmodern posthumanist, you might argue, "But the animals in literature did not write their own accounts." Animal characters may be the creations of writers’ imagination, but animals did and do exist in their own right, as did and do humans. The original essays in __Animals and Their Children in Victorian__ explore the representation of animals in children’s literature by resisting an anthropomorphized perception of them. Instead of focusing on the domestication of animals, this book analyzes how animals in literature "civilize" children, teaching them how to get along with fellow creatures—both human and nonhuman. Cover Half Title Series Page Title Page Copyright Page Dedication Contents List of Figures Preface and Acknowledgments Introduction: Little Beasts on Tight Leashes 1 Why Did the Cow Jump Over the Moon? Animals (But Mostly Pussies) in Nursery Rhymes 2 Wanted Dead or Alive: Rabbits in Victorian Children’s Literature 3 “In Friendly Chat with Bird or Beast ... Mixing Together Things Grave and Gay”: Desireful Animals and Humans in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass 4 A Brotherhood of Wolves: Loyalty in Yiddish and Anglo-Jewish Folktales 5 Advocating for the Least of These: Empowering Children and Animals in The Band of Mercy Advocate 6 Bush Animals, Developmental Time, and Colonial Identity in Victorian Australian Children’s Fiction 7 The Serpent; or, the Real King of the Jungle 8 Learning Masculinity: Education, Boyhood, and the Animal in Thomas Hughes’s Tom Brown’s School Days 9 Unruly Females on the Farm: Domestic Animal Mothers and the Dismantling of the Species Hierarchy in Nineteenth-Century Literature for Children 10 The Child Is Father of the Man: Lessons Animals Teach Children in George Eliot’s Writings 11 Neither Brutes nor Beasts: Animals, Children, and Young Persons and/in the Brontës 12 Children, Animals, and the Fantasies of the Circus 13 Imperial Pets: Monkey-Girls, Man-Cubs, and Dog-Faced Boys on Exhibition in Victorian Britain Note on Contributors Index Animals and Their Children in Victorian Culture is a collection of original essays that explore the representation of animals in children's literature. It focuses on the influence of animals to "civilize" children (and not the animals) in moral ethics and proper Victorian behavior, especially regarding human treatment of animals.