Description
Book SynopsisOriginally published in 1985. Beasts of the Modern Imagination explores a specific tradition in modern thought and art: the critique of anthropocentrism at the hands of beastswriters whose works constitute animal gestures or acts of fatality. It is not a study of animal imagery, although the works that Margot Norris explores present us with apes, horses, bulls, and mice who appear in the foreground of fiction, not as the tropes of allegory or fable, but as narrators and protagonists appropriating their animality amid an anthropocentric universe. These beasts are finally the masks of the human animals who create them, and the textual strategies that bring them into being constitute another version of their struggle. The focus of this study is a small group of thinkers, writers, and artists who create as the animalnot like the animal, in imitation of the animalbut with their animality speaking. The author treats Charles Darwin as the founder of this tradition, as the naturalist whose sha
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments
Abbreviations
Chapter 1. Introduction: The Biocentric Tradition
Chapter 2. Darwin's Reading of Nature
Chapter 3. Darwin, Nietzsche, Kafka, and the Problem of Mimesis
Chapter 4. Nietzsche's Ecce Homo: Behold the Beast
Chapter 5. The Fate of the Human Animal in Kafka's Fiction
Chapter 6. Kafka's "Josefine": The Animal as the Negative Site of Narration
Chapter 7. Max Ernst: The Rhetorical Beast of the Visual Arts
Chapter 8. The Ontology of D. H. Lawrence's St. Mawr
Chapter 9. The Animal and Violence in Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon
Chapter 10. Conclusion: The Biocentric Tradition in Context
Notes
Index
