Civilized Creatures

Urban Animals, Sentimental Culture, and American Literature, 1850-1900
Erscheinungsjahr 2005
ISBN: 978-0-8018-8071-1
Verlag: Johns Hopkins University Press

Buch, Englisch, 240 Seiten, Format (B × H): 162 mm x 236 mm, Gewicht: 449 g

Reihe: Animals, History, Culture

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, Mason shows, 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, petkeeping, 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.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Mason, Jennifer

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Geschichte einzelner Länder Amerikanische Geschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Englische Literatur Amerikanische Literatur

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Acknowledgments
Introduction. Life in the Built Environment
Chapter 1. Animal Bodies: Corporeality, Class, and Equestrianism in Susan Warner's The Wide, Wide World
Chapter 2. Animal Transformations: Sagacious Dogs, Disgusting Apes, Evolutionary Theory, and Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Marble Fawn
Chapter 3. The Domestic Angel Animal: Nature, Nurture, and Difference in the Work of Harriet Beecher Stowe
Chapter 4. Animal Justice: Charles W. Chesnutt, Black Animality, and the Politics of Animal Welfare
Conclusion: Animal Politics, Affect, and American Studies
Notes
Index

Über Autor(innen)

Mason, Jennifer
Jennifer Mason has taught English at Southern Methodist University and Skidmore College.