Description
Book SynopsisOnno Oerlemans explores a broad range of English-language poetry about animals from the Middle Ages to the contemporary world. Through careful readings of dozens of poems, Oerlemans demonstrates how poetry can sensitize us to the moral standing of animals and give us new ways to think through the problems of the human-animal divide.
Trade ReviewOnno Oerlemans’s
Poetry and Animals represents an important contribution to the scholarship on animals and human-animal relations in literature. We badly need some excellent work on poetry from a human-animal studies perspective, and this book provides a provocative, erudite, thoughtful, and engaging contribution. -- Philip Armstrong, author of
What Animals Mean in the Fiction of ModernityOerlemans interrogates how poetry, as a specific form of writing, “reveals tendrils of meaning about animals that other kinds of writing and thinking do not.” His astonishing close readings of choice examples illuminate how poetry sustains a productive ambiguity and openness in the representation—which always involves interpretation—of animals. Great for anyone teaching, writing about, or even just trying to pay attention to animals. -- Susan McHugh, University of New England
Animals are present in many poems and key to the development of poetic form, yet relatively little has been written about their formative place in poetry.
Poetry and Animals redresses the lack of attention to poetry within animal studies and highlights the essential role of our fellow creatures in the history of poetry. -- Anat Pick, Queen Mary University of London
Oerlemans is an insightful reader of poetry’s “negative capability,” its anti-solipsistic investigation of the existential entanglements that spill over the borders of self and species. This splendid book makes a convincing case that poetry has much to teach us about both the ‘animal’ as an unstable category that haunts human self-conception and the astonishing diversity of nonhuman life-worlds. It is particularly incisive as a meditation on how thinking typologically, about genres and species, may deepen our attention to the individual existence of a poem or animal. -- Tobias Menely, University of California, Davis
The book remains accessible to undergraduates and nonspecialists because of Oerleman's clear and vigorous prose and the inclusion of generous quotations from the poetry under discussion. Essential. * Choice *
A beautiful reading, where the importance of animals for poets of the past passing through the most recent ones is remarked in all its magnificence. -- Anna Maria Polidori, freelance journalist * Storie, racconti, recensioni Blog by Anna Maria Polidori *
Table of ContentsContents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. The Animal in Allegory: From Chaucer to Gray
2. Poems of the Animal
3. Poetry as Field Guide: The Species Poem
4. The Individual Animal in Poetry
5. Of Hybridity and the Hybrid
Coda
Notes
Bibliography
Index
