The Political Lives of Victorian Animals
Liberal Creatures in Literature and Culture

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

Anna Feuerstein (Author)

9781108730211, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 18 March 2021

270 pages, 4 b/w illus.
23 x 15 x 1.2 cm, 0.4 kg

'This well-written, theoretically sophisticated study makes a major contribution to the growing body of critical treatments of animals in Victorian literature and culture.' R. D. Morrison, Choice

During the Victorian era, animals were increasingly viewed not as property or utility, but as thinking, feeling subjects worthy of inclusion within a political community. This book re-examines the nineteenth-century British animal welfare movement and animal characters in the Victorian novel in light of liberal thought, and argues that liberalism was a decisive factor in determining the cultural, ideological, and material makeup of animal-human relationships. While the animal welfare movement often represented animals as desiring submission to the human, animal characters in the Victorian novel critiqued the liberal norms that led to the oppression of both animals and humans. Through readings of animal rights legislation, animal welfare texts, and writings by Charles Dickens, Lewis Carroll, Thomas Hardy, and Olive Schreiner, Anna Feuerstein outlines the remarkably powerful political role that animals played in the Victorian novel, as they offer ways to move beyond the exclusionary and contradictory strategies of liberal thought.

Introduction: the political lives of Victorian animals
Part I. Anti-Cruelty Legislation and Animal Welfare: 1. The government of animals: anti-cruelty legislation and the making of liberal creatures
2. The incessant care of the Victorian shepherd: animal welfare's pastoral power
Part II. Democracy, Education, and Alternative Subjectivity: 3. 'Tame submission to injustice is unworthy of a Raven': Charles Dickens's animal character
4. Alice in Wonderland's animal pedagogy: democracy and alternative subjectivity in mid-Victorian liberal education
Part III. The Biopolitics of Animal Capital: 5. Animal capital and the lives of sheep: Thomas Hardy's biopolitical realism
6. The political lives of animals in Victorian Empire: Oliver Schreiner's anti-colonial animal politics.

Subject Areas: Animals & society [JFFZ], Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers [DSK], Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 [DSBF]