Animal Fables after Darwin: Literature, Speciesism, and Metaphor
Cambridge University Press, 7/19/2018
EAN 9781108428200, ISBN10: 1108428207
Hardcover, 224 pages, 23.5 x 15.6 x 1.7 cm
Language: English
The ancient form of the animal fable, in which the characteristics of humans and animals are playfully and educationally intertwined, took on a wholly new meaning after Darwin's theory of evolution changed forever the relationship between humans and animals. In this original study, Chris Danta provides an important and original account of how the fable was adopted and re-adapted by nineteenth- and twentieth-century authors to challenge traditional views of species hierarchy. The rise of the biological sciences in the second half of the nineteenth century provided literary writers such as Robert Louis Stevenson, H. G. Wells, Franz Kafka, Angela Carter and J. M. Coetzee with new material for the fable. By interrogating the form of the fable, and through it the idea of human exceptionalism, writers asked new questions about the place of the human in relation to its biological milieu.
Prologue
uplifting animals
1. Looking up, looking down
orientations of the human
2. The grotesque mouth
3. 'The highest civilisation among ants'
Stevenson and the fable
4. 'An animal among the animals'
Wells and the thought of the future
5. Animal bachelors and animal brides
Kafka, Carter, Garnett
6. Scapegoats and scapegraces
becoming sacrificial animal in Kafka and Coetzee
Coda
'Diogenes of the zoo'.