Description
Book SynopsisDemonstrating the centrality of animals to an eighteenth-century literary and philosophical tradition, Animals and Other People argues for the importance of this tradition to current discussions of what life is and how we might live together.
Trade Review"Heather Keenleyside makes a significant contribution to ongoing discussions of the challenges involved in understanding the relationship between actual individual animals and the aesthetic, generic, rhetorical, and formal uses of animals in literature. With subtle, extended, and insightful critiques of well-chosen literary texts, her book provides a persuasive perspective on its key contribution, that 'rhetorical conventions make real world claims'-in other words, that real animals provide a direct point of reference for their literary representation." * Laura Brown, Cornell University *
Table of ContentsIntroduction. Animals and Other Figures
Chapter 1. The Person: Poetry, Personification, and the Composition of Domestic Society
Chapter 2. The Creature: Domestic Politics and the Novelistic Character
Chapter 3. The Human: Satire and the Naturalization of the Person
Chapter 4. The Animal: The Life Narrative as a Form of Life
Chapter 5. The Child: The Fabulous Animal and the Family Pet
Coda. Growing Human
Notes
Works Cited
Index
Acknowledgments
