Examines how liberal thought influenced representations of animals within nineteenth-century animal welfare discourse and the Victorian novel.

Moving away from the philosophical, fictional, and humanitarian sources used by previous animal studies, this work focuses on the role of animals--horses, cattle, sheep, pigs, and dogs--in shaping Georgian London.an London.

In the nineteenth century, richly-drawn social fiction became one of England’s major cultural exports. At the same time, a surprising companion came to stand alongside the novel as a key embodiment of British identity: the domesticated pet. In works by authors from the Brontës to Eliot, from Dickens to Hardy, animals appeared as markers of domestic coziness and familial kindness. Yet for all their supposed significance, the animals in nineteenth-century fiction were never granted the same fullness of character or consciousness as their human masters: they remain secondary figures. Minor Creatures re-examines a slew of literary classics to show how Victorian notions of domesticity, sympathy, and individuality were shaped in response to the burgeoning pet class. The presence of beloved animals in the home led to a number of welfare-minded political movements, inspired in part by the Darwinian thought that began to sprout at the time. Nineteenth-century animals may not have been the heroes of their own lives but, as Kreilkamp shows, the history of domestic pets deeply influenced the history of the English novel.

Jacket.

Examines the interaction between music and liberal discourses in Victorian Britain, revealing the close interdependence of political and aesthetic practices.

The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Animals surveys the role of animals across literary history and opens conversations on what literature can teach us about more-than-human life. Leading international scholars comprehensively explore how engaging with creatures of various kinds alters our understanding of what it means to write and read, and why this is important for thinking about a series of cultural, ethical, political, and scientific developments and controversies. The first part of the book offers historically rooted arguments about medieval metamorphosis, early modern fleshiness, eighteenth-century imperialism, Romantic sympathy, Victorian racial politics, modernist otherness and contemporary forms. The second part poses questions that cut across periods, concerning habitat and extinction, captivity and spectatorship, race and (post-)coloniality, sexuality and gender, religion and law, health and wealth. In doing so, this companion places animals at the centre of literary studies and literature at the heart of urgent debates in the growing field of animal studies.

Historian James Turner focuses on the great rise of Victorian concern for the humane treatment of animals, one of the most noteworthy flowering of such sentiment in modern times and one that engaged the support of the rich and the powerful, of church dignitaries, peers and ministers, and the queen herself. In delving into the history of animal rights, he also offers a fresh perspective on such varied aspects of Victorian culture as attitudes toward sex, pain, child labor, women, poverty, and science. Turner draws on extensive researh in the archives of a animal protection societies, literature of the period, and controversial writings on the treatment of animals. He argues that the dual shocks of industrialization and urbanization helped produce a deeper emotional identification with the natural world. Scientists of the day, proclaiming that human beings were close kin to beasts, not only encouraged but demanded considerate treatment for animals, a sentiment that reached its liveliest expression in the antivivisection controversy. By the turn of the century, the author demonstrates, new conceptions of human nature adn heightened sensitivity even to the plight of lower life-forms were contributing to a new understanding of man's place in nature.