The Palgrave Handbook of Animals and Literature (Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature)

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. 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