Genre, tradition and renewal: Animal autobiography and poetics of the multicentric self

Abstract

The development of animal autobiography as a genre has been constrained by the narrative possibility and epistemological impossibility of animals as autobiographers. In spite of its limitations, animal autobiography has still developed into different generic forms. Noting the generic tradition and renewal as well as the ethical ramifications in animal autobiography, this study examines how animal selfhood is constructed to render varieties of autobiographical experiences. Drawn upon autofiction/autobiography studies and literary animal studies, this article probes into the art of self-invention in animal autobiography. A “self”-oriented analysis of Dorothy Kilner’s The Life and Perambulations of A Mouse (1784) and Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty (1877) reveals the genre’s common representational strategies, such as multi-scaled perceptions of an autofictional self, critical anthropomorphism and an ethics of witness. Based on these strategies, it further examines how Katherine Applegate’s The One and Only Ivan (2012) endorses a generic continuum and renewal. Following Jacques Derrida’s key concepts in his lecture “The Animal that Therefore I Am” in the discourse of human–animal relations, this study concludes with a proposed poetics of the multicentric self in animal autobiography, which maps out the interplay of the first-person persona’s authenticity, autofiction and literary authority, and serves the genre’s increasingly prominent anti-anthropocentric purposes.