What Animals Mean in Literature

Over the last few centuries, the idea of the "modern", along with its defining activities - industrialisation, capitalism, science, colonisation - have depended heavily on animals, both real and represented. What Animals Mean in the Fiction of Modernity analyses the significance of stories about relationships between humans and nonhuman animals as they appear in several classic narratives: Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver's Travels, Frankenstein and Moby-Dick. The result is a series of new readings that demonstrate, at the heart of these ostensibly well-known texts, major elements which have been routinely overlooked as a result of the tendency to trivialise the role of animals in literary fiction. What Animals Mean shows that, far from being negligible, human-animal narratives are intimately and importantly related to the social and historical contexts of these works. The second half of the book updates these classic narratives of human-animal interactions, exploring the ways later novelists have re-worked them, in ways that reflect shifting cultural and economic pressures. The writers discussed here include H.G. Wells, Upton Sinclair, D.H. Lawrence, Ernest Hemingway, Franz Kafka, Brigid Brophy, Timothy Findley, Bernard Malamud, Will Self, Margaret Atwood, Christopher Moore and J.M. Coetzee.Armstrong, Philip is the author of 'What Animals Mean in Literature', published 2008 under ISBN 9780415358392 and ISBN 0415358396.