Animal Autobiographies Research Articles

A More “Human(e)” Society? Animal Autobiography and the Shaping of Race, Species, and Gender

At the turn of the twentieth century, animal welfare work occupied an increasingly prominent position in the United States, with women’s animal autobiographies serving particularly formative roles in teaching child readers “humane” values. During this same period, felines in particular were increasingly brought into the home even as they were also increasingly racialized in larger discourse. This article focuses on three feline autobiographies from this period, arguing that they present the racialized animal as a site of biopolitical control that ultimately resides in the hands of white women. First, the article examines how humane education initiatives taught children to exert police-like roles in animal welfare work, capitalizing on existing cultural connections between children and animals to then teach children to disidentify from and ultimately help control racialized animal bodies. Then, the essay demonstrates how the three feline autobiographies ultimately advocate for the control and shaping of racialized nonhuman and human biological reproduction. The article’s argument emphasizes the importance of interrogating these texts, published during a formative historical moment in the development of humane education, as we work to transform children’s literature and animal welfare work into sites for anti-racist thought and action.

“A Dog’s Life”: Pet-Keeping in Canadian and American Animal Autobiographies at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

“A Dog’s Life”: Pet-Keeping in Canadian and American Animal Autobiographies at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

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

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.

Why read about animals: On the formation of the animal autobiography as a literary genre in the 18th–19th century British literature

The article presents an analysis of the genesis of the genre of animal autobiography in English literature at the turn of the 18th–19th centuries. The emergence, formation and evolution of the genre is considered in three contexts. The ideas of Adam Smith and David Hume together with the pedagogical teachings of John Locke and Sarah Trimmer form the central philosophi cal concepts of the new genre: sentimental feeling, sympathy, concern for the well-being of another living being. Comparison of the animal autobiography with “novel of circulation”, a popular in the XVIII century type of novel about adventures of a thing, focuses readers atten tion on animate and inanimate narrator which leads to the didactics of a new genre. Auto biographical narratives such as “The Life and Perambulations of a Mouse” of Dorothy Kilner, “Adventures of a Donkey” of Arabella Argus, and “Black Beauty” of Anna Sewell are studied in the context of the 18th and 19th century novel culture and since the authors of such autobiogra phies were predominantly women, who were responsible for caregiving and education, within the female narrative strategies in biographies. Written over two centuries ago by women who appropriated the voices of animals and spoke of their well-being, animal autobiographies are studied in terms of ecofeminist critique and human-animal studies. It is concluded that this genre may be regarded as an enlightenment project, which had and still has not only a didac tic, but also an emancipatory function.

Writing Animality in Yoko Tawada’s Memoirs of a Polar Bear

Yoko Tawada, an author writing in both Japanese and German, is what critics call an exophonic writer, that is, a writer who uses a language other than one’s mother tongue for creative purposes. Writing from a foreign point of view is part of Tawada’s interest in acquiring perceptions of otherness both linguistically and culturally. We might apply Tawada’s exophonic writing when entering animal worlds by creating what Frederike Middelhoff terms ‘literary auto-zoographies’. Tawada’s novel Memoirs of a Polar Bear contains three generations of polar bear narratives: two circus performers and one zoo inhabitant. The text takes a postmodern metafictional approach to problems that arise in speaking for the animal other, a subject under much discussion in Animal Studies scholarship today. My article examines each of the three characters and their corresponding narrative modes. First, the grandmother polar bear writes a first-person autobiography of her life as a performer; in doing so, Tawada combines fiction and nonfiction to deconstruct the bear character’s identity thus resulting in what might be called a more authentic animal autobiography. Second, the article focuses on Tawada’s fascination with translation through the human-animal shared spaces between Tosca (the daughter of the unnamed grandmother polar bear character) and her human trainer. Lastly, the article examines the grandson, Knut, as an example of the current humanimal subject of ecopoetics with an emphasis on Knut as an environmental figure.

Perambulating Mice and the Confluence of Sympathy and Moral Education

The late eighteenth century was the locus of a burgeoning interest in animal rights. This essay examines the critical role that children’s literature had in the evolution of more consideration for animal welfare. The use of animals in the works of writers such as Sarah Trimmer, Mary Wollstonecraft, Anna Letitia Barbauld, and Dorothy Kilner helped create a form of animal subjectivity as a means of teaching children compassion through the creation of sympathy for nonhuman animals. By fostering compassion for the needs of so-called “dumb creatures” children could also be taught, by extension, to have more consideration for other people. In particular, Dorothy Kilner’s animal autobiography The Life and Perambulations of a Mouse offers a new way of viewing animals who are neither physical nor affectional slaves as worthy of both consideration and compassion.

Mark Twain in Context

Mark Twain in Context

The Necessity of an Anthropomorphic Approach to Children’s Literature

The study focuses on the necessity of an anthropomorphic approach in deconstructing the symbolic understandings of animals in children’s literature, and considers how such an approach can be used to draw ethical attention to the unnatural history of animals in the Anthropocene. The paper analyses three children’s novels that depict animals without representing their subjectivity in characteristically human terms. These novels are Eva Hornung’s ferality tale Dog Boy (2009), Sonya Hartnett’s fable The Midnight Zoo (2011) and Kate Applegate’s animal autobiography The One and Only Ivan (2012). Informed by Jacques Derrida’s anti-anthropocentric views and the ethical discourse of creaturely vulnerability, this essay argues that the world’s present state of cascading environmental impoverishment demands an anthropomorphic approach that is not inherently anthropocentric, along with an emerging kind of creaturely consciousness.

(Con)Temporary Animals: The Transgressions of Human Narration in Alain Mabanckou’s and Tristan Garcia’s Mémoires

(Con)Temporary Animals: The Transgressions of Human Narration in Alain Mabanckou’s and Tristan Garcia’s Mémoires Graham L. Bishop (bio) Two Texts, Their Authors, and the Movements in Between To what extent is the contemporary a concept limited by human experience? What would it mean to imagine an experience of being contemporary that accounts for nonhuman or more-than-human means of accessing the present? Would such an endeavor be possible, not to say necessary in the “contemporary moment” of ecological catastrophe and mass extinction? This essay answers in the affirmative through readings of two contemporary Francophone novels that fall under the genre of “animal autobiography”: Alain Mabanckou’s Mémoires de porcépic (2006) and Tristan Garcia’s Mémoires de la jungle (2010). Drawing on Jacques Derrida’s exploration of the autobiographical animal in “L’Animal que donc je suis” and Giorgio Agamben’s definition of the contemporary subject, I read these novels as examples of a narrative temporality whereby humans can both follow after and be present with animal others. I attribute this temporality to the novels’ shared technique of metalepsis, defined in narratology as a transgression of the boundary separating a given diegetic “storyworld” from the world outside of (extradiegetic to) the narrative: Although both novels initially assume the form indicated by their titles—“memoirs” authored by animal subjects (a porcupine in Mabanckou’s text; a chimpanzee in Garcia’s) who recollect past experiences—the intrusions made by [End Page 912] voices of human narrators at the ends of both works draw attention to and undermine the artificial boundaries of this form. Readers thus encounter two alternative representations of contemporaneity, neither of which require the anthropocentric division between the speaking human subject, who manifests presence, and the mute animal other, who remains trapped within an evolutionary past. Born in Congo-Brazzaville in 1966, Alain Mabanckou published poetry through the 1990s before winning the 1999 Grand prix littéraire d’Afrique noire for his first novel, Bleu-Blanc-Rouge. He then became one of the Francophone world’s most successful contemporary African novelists, winning both the 2005 Prix des cinq continents de la fran-cophonie for Verre cassé and the 2006 Prix Renaudot for Mémoires de porc-épic. Animals make frequent appearances in his work, but Mémoires de porc-épic is his only book narrated from an animal point-of-view to date. In the style of an autobiographical confession, a porcupine named Ngoumba recollects his life as the “harmful double” of a young man named Kibandi: leaving the “animal world,” the porcupine follows Kibandi’s orders to “eat” the bodies and souls of his enemies. When gluttony drives Kibandi to eat a few souls he should have left alone—an infant, for example—the spiritual world takes revenge and kills him, leaving the porcupine without a human host. Pursued by outraged villagers, the porcupine flees into the forest. After following his “instinct” for a couple of nights, he comes across a baobab tree on the bank of a river he fails to cross (38–39) and decides to confess to it his crimes. Novelist and object-oriented philosopher Tristan Garcia was born in 1981 in Toulouse, France, but spent much of his childhood in Algeria. He won the 2008 Prix de Flore for his debut novel, La Meilleure Part des hommes (translated into English as Hate: A Romance), an exploration of AIDS and its impact on gay culture in 1980s Paris. As a philosopher, he is most known for his speculative realist work Forme et objet: Un traité des choses, published in 2011; he is also the author of Nous, animaux et humains: Actualité de Jeremy Bentham, an essay on utilitarianism and animal suffering published earlier that year. He received little attention in 2010 for his second novel, Mémoires de la jungle, a work of post-apocalyptic science-fiction narrated by a chimpanzee named Doogie. Doogie begins his story orbiting the Earth aboard a space shuttle, as an involuntary participant in a publicity stunt designed to save the failing experimental zoo where he has been raised. The shuttle crash-lands in the middle of the African jungle, where Doogie finds no...

Art for Animals: Visual Culture and Animal Advocacy, 1870–1914 by J. Keri Cronin

Reviewed by: Art for Animals: Visual Culture and Animal Advocacy, 1870–1914 by J. Keri Cronin Catherine Paulin Cronin, J. Keri – Art for Animals: Visual Culture and Animal Advocacy, 1870–1914. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2018. Pp. 247. Art historian J. Keri Cronin exposes the ways that animals, history and, culture were interconnected by exploring the visuals used by animal advocacy groups in Britain and North America between 1870 and 1914. Her work is interdisciplinary, combining methods and theories from visual culture as well as critical animal studies. The focus of the book is on the later half of the nineteenth century, when the author argues that iconography was an integral, and even expected, part of animal advocacy (p. 16). Her research is based on the premise that all art, high as well as low, worked in conjunction to create a context where it was possible to discuss the role of non-human animals. The main objective is not to explore the imagery used by advocates exhaustively, nor to present an analysis of only one category of art, but rather to bring to light how different meanings could be understood from these visuals depending on the context (time and space), the individual examining the art, and the presentation medium. The author suggests that examining the visual culture that was employed by animal advocacy groups in the United States, Canada, and Britain is a good way of revisiting the issues prevalent in human-animal relations, today but also in historical contexts. Cronin also submits that it can lead to new ways of understanding the functioning of these early groups and further reveals the importance of visual culture to animal advocates. The book includes an introduction, five chapters, and a conclusion. It contains a list of the many beautiful illustrations found within the book at the beginning, as well as an index at the end. The first chapter, "Educate Them Artistically," serves as a background to the following sections: it presents the use and importance of pictures and visual culture by animal advocates. The second chapter brings forward the importance of "bearing witness" in animal advocacy when "many people chose to look away, to avoid eye contact, and not visually engage with a difficult sight" (p. 71). Cronin reminds us of the importance of knowing the context of creation and exhibition for documentary-type visuals and discusses the "politics of sight" (or who is allowed to see what) (pp. 80–83, 92–94). She demonstrates how advocates aimed to stop the "cultural invisibility" of certain activities by using new technologies such as increasingly accessible photography (pp. 85–92). The third chapter is not concerned with the "truth-telling" inspired by documentary images but rather by the "sympathetic imagination": the creation of meaning and the discussions brought about by the [End Page 479] diffusion of animal autobiographies as well as drawings, cartoons. and paintings of animals using various artistic techniques (pp. 100–129). The fourth chapter reflects on advocacy in public space. Public art such as the monument to the "Brown Dog" used in vivisection experiments, the involvement of public figures, campaigns, public protests, and exhibits all drew attention to animal advocacy groups and the animals they aimed to protect and defend, making them increasingly visible. The author therefore reminds us that "the proper treatment of nonhuman animals in the modern world was negotiated in very public sites" (p. 166). The use of visuals in public space was of the utmost importance to help make visible what was otherwise imperceptible to others. However, advocacy could also take place inside of the home; a point which is explored by the author in chapter 5. Decorating the drawing room to the taste of activist owners was a statement to visitors, but the context of the home led to certain visuals feeling less intimidating and could therefore allow for a reduction of meaning (p. 189). The homes used as spaces for animal advocacy were also dominated by the middle class: links are drawn by the author between proper family values, domesticity, motherhood, civility, and animal advocacy (p. 189). Through this first look at how visual culture is historically deployed by animal advocacy...

Review of Julie A. Smith’s “Representing Animal Minds in Early Animal Autobiography: Charlotte Tucker’s The Rambles of a Rat and Nineteenth-Century Natural History.”

Review of Julie A. Smith’s “Representing Animal Minds in Early Animal Autobiography: Charlotte Tucker’s The Rambles of a Rat and Nineteenth-Century Natural History.”

Literary Autozoographies: Contextualizing Species Life in German Animal Autobiography

What does it mean to take animal autobiography seriously and how can we account for the representation of life-narrating animals? The article investigates animal autobiographies as ‘literary autozoographies’, drawing attention to both the generic contexts and the epistemological premises of these texts. Adopting a double-bind approach stemming from autobiographical research as well as cultural animal studies, the article focuses on early nineteenth-century equine autozoographies from the German-speaking tradition. These texts are discussed exemplarily in relation to the parameters of fictional autobiographies, before they are contextualized with historical discourses regarding horses in natural history and so-called ‘horse-science’. Due to the fact that the poetics and aesthetics of the genre are modeled on the templates of factual autobiographies, the article argues that literary autozoographies can be read as fictional autobiographies as well as meta-auto/biographical discourse undermining autobiographical conventions. Furthermore, it shows that literary autozoography and zoology share a common historical and ideological epistemology accounting for the representation of animals in both fields. Literary autozoographies thus participate in the negotiation and production of species-specific knowledge. Reading Life of the Mecklenburg Mare Amante (1804), Life of a Job Horse (1807) and Life of a Worn-Out Hack (1819) alongside equine-centric discourses around 1800, the article demonstrates in what ways these texts can be regarded as part of a regime of knowledge attributing emotions and cognitive capacities to horses, while simultaneously arguing for humane treatment on the basis of interspecies homologies.

Animal Autobiography; Or, Narration beyond the Human

In engaging with acts of self-narration that cross species lines, creators of animal autobiographies also broach questions about genre, truth status, and the structure as well as the politics of narrative representation. To address these questions, the present article draws not just on scholarship on (animal) autobiography but also on ideas from the fields of linguistic semantics, politeness theory, and discourse analysis, including the “framing and footing” approach that focuses on talk emerging in contexts of face-to-face interaction and that derives most directly from the work of Erving Goffman. On the basis of this research, and using case studies that range from animal riddles to Ceridwen Dovey’s Only the Animals (2014), a collection of life stories posthumously narrated by a variety of nonhuman tellers, I profile autobiographical acts that reach beyond the human as ways of speaking for or in behalf of animal others. Some animal autobiographies correlate with acts of telling for which humans themselves remain the principals as well as authors; their animal animators remain relegated to the role of commenting on human institutions, values, practices, and artifacts. Other examples, however, can be read as co-authored acts of narrating in behalf of equally hybrid (or “humanimal”) principals. These experiments with narration beyond the human afford solidarity-building projections of other creatures’ ways of being-in-the-world—projections that enable a reassessment, in turn, of forms of human being.

Vectors of a Flea: The Convergence of Species in Victorian Animal Autobiographies

This essay examines three late-nineteenth-century novels— The Autobiography of a Flea, Black Beauty , and Beautiful Joe —that muddle the pornography and animal autobiography genres, revealing how representations of inter-species violence and sexuality were used to narrativize evolution and dissolve the ontological divide between human and animal.

REPRESENTING ANIMAL MINDS IN EARLY ANIMAL AUTOBIOGRAPHY: CHARLOTTE TUCKER'STHE RAMBLES OF A RATAND NINETEENTH-CENTURY NATURAL HISTORY

Animal autobiography–a first-personfictional narrative in which an animal tells its own story – emerged in the late eighteenth century as the first attempt to represent animal minds in extended narrative form. Authors of this genre were anxious to create accurate, believable animal characters, even as they afforded them human language and a habit of critical commentary. To do this, they wrote in sync with scientific understandings of animals as set out in books of natural history. A few authors are explicit about their debt to natural history, and their comments point to a broad but intended compatibility between the ideas of animal minds in animal autobiography and those in the popularized scientific discourse of the day.

Animal Autobiography and the Domestication of Human Freedom

This essay explores the American production and reception of the nineteenth-century animal autobiography, a genre of children’s literature that was popularized through the humane education efforts of the early animal welfare movement. In foregrounding how the animal autobiography contributed to the increasing ascription of “humanity” to nonhuman animals over the course of the nineteenth century, this essay ultimately shows how the animal autobiography facilitated new modes of racial management that relied on the circumscribed recognition of black humanity. This reading of the animal autobiography shows how the genre of the animal autobiography adapts the conventions of the slave narrative only to “domesticate” former slaves’ claim to human freedom.

Figuring the Animal Autobiography: Animals and Landscapes in Daniel Naudé's Exhibition “African Scenery & Animals”

SummaryDaniel Naudé's exhibition of photographic artworks, “African Scenery & Animals”, is discussed in this article, to consider the ways in which images of animal beings are mostly received as figurative vehicles for anthropocentric narratives. Naudé's particularised portraits of AfriCanis dogs and other domestic creatures are considered in relation to figurative anthropocentric analysis of the artworks that the artist's gallery and other reviewers have undertaken. I argue that Naudé's oeuvre is more in line with J.M. Coetzee's fictional character Elizabeth Costello's notion of imaginative empathy, proposing the capacity of human beings to imagine what it might be like to be an(other) (Coetzee 2004: 79), and that Naudé's portraits of animal beings provoke imaginative empathetic (Coetzee 2004: 79) transposition in the viewer. I recount my imaginative empathetic encounters (Coetzee 2004: 79) with particular artworks from the “African Scenery & Animals” series, and consider the imperial legacy of the landscape genre and the photographic medium employed by Naudé in relation to the artist's use of destabilising formal and contextual devices.

Writing the Postcolonial Animal: Patrice Nganang's Temps de Chien

Patrice Nganang introduces an animal character in his novel Temps de chien and the dog is the autodiegetic narrator who begins the story: “Je suis un chien,” (“I am a dog”) he says at the outset. Having a dog speak in a kind of canine autobiography is not new—Miguel de Cervantes (Novela del coloquio de los perros, 1613) and E. T. A. Hoffmann (Die neusten Schicksale des Hundes Berganza, 1814) did it before—but Patrice Nganang couples it with geographical transplantation: the story takes place in Yaoundé, Cameroon, which is a way of decentering the point of view onto another continent. Moreover, endowing animals with the power of speech has been fairly common since Aesop and in every oral tradition, especially in tales, but this practice is part of a strategy typical of postcolonial literature, which aims at reclaiming an oral tradition that had been muzzled by colonization for a long time, as well as at appropriating Western literary genres. As postcolonial studies tend to join environmental approaches and “animal studies,” this article aims at showing to what extent animal autobiography partakes of a philosophical and political projects which aspires to un-think Eurocentrism and to deconstruct logocentrism in the context of a literature which renews the pastoral and the fable.

Talking Animals in British Children's Fiction, 1786–1914, and: Victorian Fiction and the Cult of the Horse (review)

Reviewed by: Talking Animals in British Children's Fiction, 1786-1914, and: Victorian Fiction and the Cult of the Horse Zoe Jaques (bio) Tess Cosslet , Talking Animals in British Children's Fiction, 1786–1914 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006) 205 pages, hardback, £45 (ISBN 0 7546 3656 9); Gina M. Dorré , Victorian Fiction and the Cult of the Horse (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006) 179 pages, hardback, £47.50 (ISBN 0 7546 5515 6). The nineteenth century saw a significant rise in animal-welfare groups, including the SPCA in 1824 and the anti-vivisectionist Victoria League in 1876, a cause supported by Lewis Carroll's Some Popular Fallacies about Vivisection (1875). The emergence of ecocritical and post-human theory has led to a renewed interest in the place of animals in this period. Although differently positioned in their relation to post-humanism, Tess Cosslett's Talking Animals in British Children's Fiction, 1786–1914and Gina M. Dorré's Victorian Fiction and the Cult of the Horse are both clearly influenced by animal-rights agendas and work to complicate naturalised relationships between humans and animals. While Cosslett is more interested in animals themselves, Dorré focuses on how animals relate to human identities. [End Page 354] Across six chronologically ordered chapters, and in what is essentially a series of readings of grouped and paired texts, Cosslett critiquesa range of work from Rousseau's Émile (1762) to Grahame's The Windin the Willows (1908). In her opening chapter, Cosslett sees SarahTrimmer's An Easy Introduction to the Knowledge of Nature (1770) as standing out from other late eighteenth-century works (such as Thomas Day's Sandford and Merton (1783–9), Mary Wollstonecraft's Original Stories from Real Life (1788), and Anna Barbauld and John Aikin's Evenings at Home (1792–6)), by advocating a more positive treatment of animals. Trimmer here exemplifies an early animal-rights tension by attempting to reconcile Man's God-given superiority with the need to be sympathetic towards animals (18). Although Cosslett finds tracesof political debates (36) in these stories, she argues that they largely reinforce traditional hierarchies both between humans and at the intersections of human-animal relations. Cosslett's second discussion focuses on Sarah Trimmer's Fabulous Histories (1786) (later published as The Story of the Robins) and the fanciful Papillonades, a group of poems so named by Mary V. Jackson, which are all 'sequels to or imitations of William Roscoe's (1807) The Butterfly Ball and the Grasshopper's Feast' (Cosslett, 40).1 Cosslett frames thischapter around the question: '… how and why does anyone write stories about talking animals for children in an age of Enlightenment and Reason, of Progress and Modernity?' (37). Her answer is simply that these authors wished '… to amuse and interest a juvenile audience, and to arouse their sympathy and benevolent instincts' (39), a Horation aim typical of the period. Cosslett teases out a range of tensions expressed by the authors, however, and this is where the strength ofthe chapter lies. Here she argues against Mary V. Jackson's political bifurcation of children's literature as either conservative or socially mobile. Instead, Cosslett sees these talking-animal stories as occupying a middle ground, whereby carnivalesque elements fracture attempts at full social stability. The third chapter situates Black Beauty within its talking-animal contexts. Cosslett shows how a range of books, including Argus's The Adventures of a Donkey (1815), Cobbe's Confessions of a Lost Dog (1867), and Stables's Sable and White: the Autobiography of a Show Dog (1894), work against seeing animals as mere machines. She also shows how such 'animal autobiography' has striking similarities with contemporary slave narratives, in offering first-hand accounts of abuse, invoking sympathy, and making readers empathise against large gaps in identity. Because the early chapters are at least partially engaged with the recovery of several forgotten works, they tend to lack detailed textual [End Page 355] analysis. Chapters four, five and six, however, redress this deficiency. Chapter four considers Margaret Gatty's Parables from Nature and Charles Kingsley's The Water-Babies in critically orthodox terms, whereby Gatty opposes evolutionary theory and Kingsley reconciles it withnatural theology. Cosslett's originality, however...

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The new books on our shelf