Animal Victorians English 7770: British Literature

Professor Jessica Straley Spring 2021

IVC: Tuesdays & Thursdays 12:25-1:45pm No single attitude fully encompasses our paradoxical relationship with animals: we love them, we kill them, we preserve them, we cage them, we eat them, we dress them, we wear them, we imagine their inner thoughts, we damage their physical bodies, and we define our humanity both against and in relation to our understanding of them. Many of these contradictions came into focus during the Victorian period in 19th-century Britain. The Victorian period saw the birth of animal protection movements, an increasing sentimentality about household pets, the growing popularity of vegetarianism, the initiation of dog and cat shows, the opening of the London Zoo, debates about medical experimentation on animals, and the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. Tracing the current discourse of Animals Studies back to the Victorian period, we will read literary, scientific, political, and theoretical texts that began this cultural conversation about our interactions with, treatment of, and similarity to other animals. Possible readings include Jules Verne’s Twenty-Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty, H. G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau, and Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, short stories by Margaret Gatty, Sheridan Le Fanu, Rudyard Kipling, and Saki, poety by Anna Barbauld, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Alfred Lord Tennyson, and Lewis Carroll, paintings by Edwin Landseer and Rosa Bonheur, taxidermy displays by Carl Akeley and Walter Potter, scientific studies by Charles Darwin and T.H. Huxley, as well as theoretical interventions by Jacques Derrida, Cary Wolfe, Erica Fudge, Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari. We will read 19th- and early 20th-century literary works in their original historical contexts and alongside recent critical developments in Animal Studies to think through our interactions with animals, their relations to us, our responsibilities to them, and their challenge to the boundaries between us and them, nature and culture, and even life and death. [Images above (clockwise): Edwin Landseer’s “Dignity and Impudence” (1839); Arthur Rackham’s “Black Cat” (1900); Punch’s “The Lion of the Season” (1861); and Henry Lee’s “Devil-fish” (1875)]