What Animals Mean in the Fiction of Modernity

Society & Animals, 2002

The presence of nonhuman animals in works of fiction vary: from children's story-books and young adult novels-which often feature them to the exclusion of human characters-and adult fiction-which occasionally gives them a titular role, as in Sterchi's The cow (1988) and Hoeg's The woman and the ape (1996) to a minimal presence-an occasional, tired, animal metaphor (take that, you dirty rat) or the inevitable, absent referent (the protagonist waved away the menu and ordered his usual steak, medium rare).

Animalities: Literary and Cultural Studies Beyond the Human, ed. Michael Lundblad, 2017

The End of the Animal--Literary and Cultural Animalities

The Bryn Mawr Review of Comparative Literature 10.1 , 2012

New Horizons in English Studies, 2020

The so-called animal turn in literature has fostered the evolution of animal studies, a discipline aimed at interrogating the ontological, ethical, and metaphysical implications of animal depictions. Animal studies deals with representation and agency in literature, and its insights have fundamental implications for understanding the conception and progression of human-animal interactions. Considering questions raised by animal studies in the context of literary depictions of animals in science fiction, this article threads John Berger’s characterization of the present as a time of radical marginalization of animals in his essay “Why Look at Animals?” through two highly influential science fiction texts: H. G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau and Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. Applying Berger’s reasoning to these two novels raises issues of personhood, criteria for ontological demarcation, and the dynamics of power, providing an opportunity to clarify, mod...

(on Jacques Derrida’s The Animal that Therefore I Am [New York: Fordham UP, 2008]; Cary Wolfe’s Animal Rites: Posthumanism and the Discourse of Species [Chicago: Chicago UP, 2003]; Carrie Rohman’s, Stalking the Subject: Modernism and the Animal [New York: Columbia UP, 2009); and Philip Armstrong’s, What Animals Mean in the Fiction of Modernity [London: Routledge, 2008])

Hopeful Modernisms, 2022

According to R. L. Stevenson’s definition, later reframed by Christ Danta into a very apt definition for modern brief tales involving animals, after Darwin’s evolutionary theories traditional animal fables strived to highlight the analogies between human and non-human life (2018: 12-13). My paper will deal with three specimens of Modernist animal fables as regards the crucial aspect of their non-human animal characters’ eating behaviour. In texts such as O. Henry’s “Memoirs of a Yellow Dog” (1906), David Garnett’s “Lady into Fox” (1921), Virginia Woolf’s Flush (1933) and Karen Blixen’s “The Monkey” (1934) the animal characters are portrayed also as eating creatures, which is unquestionably a significant aspect of their literary representation. Such a realistic note, when inserted in fable-like contexts, is surely demanding more thorough examination. As Modernism was a literary epoch in which food and eating habits gained special preeminence (Coghlan 2014, Gladwin 2019), to investigate the topic of eating animals could attain a twofold goal: on the one hand it could implement the animalistic point of view in Food Studies research, and, on the other, it could shed new light on the figure of the modern animal, and on the more bodily and concrete features of its “eruption” (Rohman 2021: 386) in 20th literature.

Word and Text, 2021

In 'On the Animal Turn', Harriet Ritvo notes that though 'learned attention to animals is far from new', stretching indeed as far back as Aristotle's Historia Animalium, 'nevertheless, during the last several decades, animals have emerged as a more frequent focus on scholarship in the humanities and social sciences, as quantified in published books and articles, conference presentations, new societies, and new journals.' 1 Before delving into Timothy C. Baker's Writing Animals, itself part of one of a scholarly series to have emerged in this budding field (Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature), it is useful to note a few things about the circumstances attending the field's rise. As its name clearly suggests, literary animal studies is a subset within the array of subfields within so-called 'critical animal studies', which also include ecology, philosophy, ethics, history, cognition and language studies, but also, and equally importantly, social justice and activist movements, from ones focused on preservation of habitats, the humane treatment of animals and the ban on industrial and medical exploitation and cruelty to positive animal rights in freedom and dignity, to vegetarianism and veganism. Institutionally, as we learn from the accounts of Nik Taylor and Richard Twine, as well as Anthony J. Nocella II et al., critical animal studies grew out of nineteenth-century interventions like Henry Salt's Animals' Rights Considered in Relation to Moral Progress of 1894 and the post WW2 confluence between animal rights and other social justice movements as reflected in Peter Singer's foundational Animal Liberation of 1975, until they led to the foundation of the Center on Animal Liberation Affairs in 2001 and the Institute for Critical Animal Studies in 2007. The affiliated Journal for Critical Animal Studies was re-launched in the same year as a follow-up to its previous incarnation, the Animal Liberation Philosophy and

Anthrozoos: A Multidisciplinary Journal of The Interactions of People & Animals, 2012

Literary Animal Studies began, as did most of the disciplines that contribute to Animal Studies and Human-Animal Studies, in the 1980s. That era of raised social-consciousness opened academic disciplines to many new perspectives. The unique contribution Animal Studies made was to suggest that other-than-human perspectives not only existed but could expand and enhance human consciousness beyond what since the Middle Ages had been believed to be the impermeable boundary between human and animal. Increased knowledge and awareness of nonhuman possibility came and continues to come from virtually every existing academic discipline. What Literary Animal Studies contributes to the mix is the news that the arts, their roots in humans' earliest response to the world and those they shared it with, still retain the power to rekindle that deep time when the boundary between human and animal was permeable, when humans knew they were one among many other animals, and anthropocentrism had not yet emerged to deny that kinship.

Literary transformations from human to animal have occurred in myths, folklore, fairy tales and narratives from all over the world since ancient times, and have always provided a narrative space for depictions of power, agency, and the radical nature of change. In Following the Animal, these transformations are analysed with regards to their use in modern literature from northern-most Europe, with specific attention being paid to the insights they provide regarding the human-animal relationship, both generally in the industrialized West, and against the background of more specific circumstances in the Nordic area. In three analytic chapters, focusing respectively on Swedish author August Strindberg’s novel Tschandala (1887), Finnish author Aino Kallas’s novel The Wolf’s Bride (1928), and Danish author Karen Blixen/Isak Dinesen’s short story “The Monkey” (1934), along with discussions of a range of other authors and texts, the reader is introduced to several traditions of literary production that both connect to, and differ from, Anglophone and other literature in fascinating ways. In addition to the insights it provides concerning the uses of human-animal transformations in modern Nordic literature, and their significance in relation to “the question of the animal”, Following the Animal also offers literary scholars and students alike a series of useable and transferable strategies for approaching texts from a “more-than-anthropocentric”, human-animal studies perspective. In phrasing and employing the interpretational method of “following the animal” over the text’s surface, up metaphorical elevations, down material wormholes, and in constant dialogue with previous research, this book contributes greatly to both human-animal literary studies specifically, and to the field of literary scholarship generally, in both an international and northern-European context.