Description
Book SynopsisIn eighteenth-century England, the encounter between humans and other animals took a singular turn with the discovery of the great apes and the rise of bourgeois pet keeping. These historical changes created a new cultural and intellectual context for the understanding and representation of animal-kind, and the nonhuman animal has thus played a significant role in imaginative literature from that period to the present day. In Homeless Dogs and Melancholy Apes, Laura Brown shows how the literary works of the eighteenth century use animal-kind to bring abstract philosophical, ontological, and metaphysical questions into the realm of everyday experience, affording a uniquely flexible perspective on difference, hierarchy, intimacy, diversity, and transcendence.
Writers of this first age of the rise of the animal in the modern literary imagination used their nonhuman charactersfrom the lapdogs of Alexander Pope and his contemporaries to the ill-mannered monkey of Frances Bur
Trade Review
In this delicate and sophisticated book, Laura Brown... seeks to restore lost or neglected dimensions of the interplay between animal and human. She focuses on representations of apes, pet monkeys, and lapdogs, and finally turns her attention to fictions narrated by dogs—a Cervantean tradition that has prospered, thanks lately to Paul Auster and Andrew O' Hagan, into the present.... Apes, though impugned sometimes as rapists, were also credited with the most delicate sensitivities, including modesty, honor, and justice, and Brown captures the excitement of their gradual discovery through the imaginative flights that attended it.
-- Jennie Erin Smith * Times Literary Supplement *
Table of ContentsPreface
1 Speculative Space: The Rise of the Animal in the Modern Imagination
2 Mirror Scene: The Orangutan, the Ancients, and the Cult of Sensibility
3 Immoderate Love: The Lady and the Lapdog
4 Violent Intimacy: The Monkey and the Marriage Plot
5 Dog Narrative: Itinerancy, Diversity, and the Elysium of Dogs
Index
