Victorians and Their Animals

Victorians and Their Animals: Beast on a Leash investigates the notion that British Victorians did see themselves as a naturally dominant species over other humans and over animals. They were conscientiously, hegemonically 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 posthumanism and other theories, including queer, postcolonialist, deconstructionist, and Marxist approaches 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, to satirize hypocrisy or breach of behavior or to voice social protest. All of the chapters analyze the interdependence of people and animals during the nineteenth century.

Brenda Ayres teaches English for Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia, and has previously edited several collections of essays. The most recent is Biographical Misrepresentations of British Women Writers: A Hall of Mirrors and the Long Nineteenth Century (2017). Her latest monograph is Betwixt and Between: The Biographies of Mary Wollstonecraft (2017). She published her first article on animals in Victorian literature in The George Eliot-George Henry Lewes Newsletter (1991), titled "Dogs in George Eliot's Adam Bede." She began collecting information on the subject when she created a panel at the Southern Conference of British Studies in 2000 titled "Animals in Victorian Literature" and presented "The Iconization of Animals in Victorian Culture." Two years later she spoke on "Beast on a Leash: Victorian Dominion over the Animal Kingdom" at the Mid-Atlantic Popular Conference.

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 Creatures in Hardy's The Return of the Native ANNA WEST 6 It's Raining Cats and Dogs in the Novels of George Eliot BRENDA AYRES 7 A Fine Kettle of Fish: Cultural (and Culinary) Preservation in Anglo-Jewish Ghetto Stories LINDSAY KATZIR 8 Gendered Metamorphoses in the Natural History Museum and Trans-Animality in Richard Marsh's The Beetle PANDORA SYPEREK 9 The "Animality" of Speech and Translation in The Jungle Books CHRISTIE HARNER Notes on Contributors Index