Civilized creatures : urban animals, sentimental culture, and American literature, 1850-1900 / Jennifer Mason.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Mason, Jennifer, 1972-

Series:

Animals, history, culture

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

American fiction--19th century--History and criticism.

American fiction.

Animals in literature.

Animal welfare--Moral and ethical aspects--United States.

Animal welfare.

Animal welfare--United States--History--19th century.

Human-animal relationships in literature.

City and town life in literature.

Sentimentalism in literature.

History.

Animal welfare--Moral and ethical aspects.

United States.

Physical Description:

x, 229 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

Baltimore : The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005.

Summary:

In Civilized Creatures, Jennifer Mason challenges some of our most enduring ideas about how encounters with nonhuman nature shaped American literature and culture. Mason argues that in the second half of the nineteenth century the most powerful influence on Americans' understanding of their affinities with animals was not increasing separation from the pastoral and the wilderness; instead, it was the population's feelings about the ostensibly civilized animals they encountered in their daily lives.

Americans of diverse backgrounds found it attractive as well as politic to imagine themselves as most closely connected to those creatures who shared humans' aptitude for civilized life. And to the minds of many in this period, national prosperity depended less on periodic exposure to untamed, wild nature than it did on the proper care and keeping of such animals within suburban and urban environments.

Combining literary analysis with cultural histories of equestrianism, pet keeping, and the animal welfare movement, Civilized Creatures offers new readings of works by Susan Warner, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Charles W. Chesnutt. In each case, Mason demonstrates that understanding contemporary relationships between humans and animals is essential for understanding the debates about gender, race, and cultural power enacted in these texts.

Contents:

Introduction: Life in the Built Environment 1

1 Animal Bodies: Corporeality, Class, and Equestrianism in Susan Warner's The Wide, Wide World 29

2 Animal Transformations: Sagacious Dogs, Disgusting Apes, Evolutionary Theory, and Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Marble Faun 52

3 The Domestic Angel Animal: Nature, Nurture, and Difference in the Work of Harriet Beecher Stowe 95

4 Animal Justice: Charles W. Chesnutt, Black Animality, and the Politics of Animal Welfare 119

Conclusion: Animal Politics, Affect, and American Studies 157.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 175-219) and index.

ISBN:

0801880718

OCLC:

56617159