Victorian Animal Dreams
The Victorian period witnessed the beginning of a debate on the status of animals that continues today. This volume explicitly acknowledges the way twenty-first-century deliberations about animal rights and the fact of past and prospective animal extinction haunt the discussion of the Victorians' obsession with animals. Combining close attention to historical detail with a sophisticated analytical framework, the contributors examine the various forms of human dominion over animals, including imaginative possession of animals in the realms of fiction, performance, and the visual arts, as well as physical control as manifest in hunting, killing, vivisection and zookeeping. The diverse range of topics, analyzed from a contemporary perspective, makes the volume a significant contribution to Victorian studies. The conclusion by Harriet Ritvo, the pre-eminent authority in the field of Victorian/animal studies, provides valuable insight into the burgeoning field of animal studies and points toward future studies of animals in the Victorian period.
Teaching the Animal
Split into three sections, Teaching the Animal provides in-depth analysis of the nature of the discipline, the resources available, expectations of students and faculty, and a number of sample curricula in the fields of humanities, social sciences, and the natural sciences.
The Political Lives of Victorian Animals
Examines how liberal thought influenced representations of animals within nineteenth-century animal welfare discourse and the Victorian novel.
Victorians and Their Animals
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.
Pets and Domesticity in Victorian Literature and Culture
Addressing the significance of the pet in the Victorian period, this book examines the role played by the domestic pet in delineating relations for each member of the "natural" family home. Flegel explores the pet in relation to the couple at the head of the house, to the children who make up the family’s dependents, and to the common familial "outcasts" who populate Victorian literature and culture: the orphan, the spinster, the bachelor, and the same-sex couple. Drawing upon both animal studies and queer theory, this study stresses the importance of the domestic pet in elucidating normative sexuality and (re)productivity within the familial home, and reveals how the family pet operates as a means of identifying aberrant, failed, or perverse familial and gender performances. The family pet, that is, was an important signifier in Victorian familial ideology of the individual family unit’s ability to support or threaten the health and morality of the nation in the Victorian period. Texts by authors such as Clara Balfour, Juliana Horatia Ewing, E. Burrows, Bessie Rayner Parkes, Anne Brontë, George Eliot, Frederick Marryat, and Charles Dickens speak to the centrality of the domestic pet to negotiations of gender, power, and sexuality within the home that both reify and challenge the imaginary structure known as the natural family in the Victorian period. This book highlights the possibilities for a familial elsewhere outside of normative and restrictive models of heterosexuality, reproduction, and the natural family, and will be of interest to those studying Victorian literature and culture, animal studies, queer studies, and beyond.
