Unreeling time in Remembering Dogs, I ask the kind reader to join me in reminiscence with love and affection mutts, mongrels, the high bred that filled our lives with the purest joy. Perhaps, the title should read more explicitly as Remembering Dogs In and About a Restaurant, a landmark restaurant my parents owned in Coney Island during its hey-day, and decline. It had a dual reputation, as a restaurant with a solid cucina and, the site of a prominent kennel which housed on average forty to fifty dogs of various breeds. My father was the foremost fancier of the Boston Terrier in the USA, he had no prejudices against any other breed, he loved them all. There were times when I thought his sporting life as a fancier of the Boston Terrier, the American Breed, was a tip of the hat tribute to the country that gave a 16 year old immigrant warmth and a place. Many a day he preferred the company of the dogs in his kennel than the company of his dining patrons. You, the reader, are eager to tell me tales about your dog. I shall temper your impetuosity, and mine, by a passing salute to the restaurant dog.

In Pet Projects, Elizabeth Young joins an analysis of the representation of animals in nineteenth-century fiction, taxidermy, and the visual arts with a first-person reflection on her own scholarly journey. Centering on Margaret Marshall Saunders, a Canadian woman writer once famous for her animal novels, and incorporating Young’s own experience of a beloved animal’s illness, this study highlights the personal and intellectual stakes of a “pet project” of cultural criticism. Young assembles a broad archive of materials, beginning with Saunders’s novels and widening outward to include fiction, nonfiction, photography, and taxidermy. She coins the term “first-dog voice” to describe the narrative technique of novels, such as Saunders’s Beautiful Joe, written in the first person from the perspective of an animal. She connects this voice to contemporary political issues, revealing how animal fiction such as Saunders’s reanimates nineteenth-century writing about both feminism and slavery. Highlighting the prominence of taxidermy in the late nineteenth century, she suggests that Saunders transforms taxidermic techniques in surprising ways that provide new forms of authority for women. Young adapts Freud to analyze literary representations of mourning by and for animals, and she examines how Canadian writers, including Saunders, use animals to explore race, ethnicity, and national identity. Her wide-ranging investigation incorporates twenty-first as well as nineteenth-century works of literature and culture, including recent art using taxidermy and contemporary film. Throughout, she reflects on the tools she uses to craft her analyses, examining the state of scholarly fields from feminist criticism to animal studies. With a lively, first-person voice that highlights experiences usually concealed in academic studies by scholarly discourse—such as detours, zigzags, roadblocks, and personal experience—this unique and innovative book will delight animal enthusiasts and academics in the fields of animal studies, gender studies, American studies, and Canadian studies.