Victorians and Their Animals: Beast on a Leash, investigates the notion that British Victorians did see themselves as naturally dominant species over other humans and over animals. They conscientiously, hegemonically were determined to rule those beneath them and the animal within themselves albeit with varying degrees of success and fail
Brenda Ayres teaches English for Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia, and has previously edited several collections of essays. The most recent is Biographical Misrepresentations of British Women Writers: A Hall of Mirrors and the Long Nineteenth Century (2017). Her latest monograph is Betwixt and Between: The Biographies of Mary Wollstonecraft (2017). She published her first article on animals in Victorian literature in The George Eliot-George Henry Lewes Newsletter (1991), titled "Dogs in George Eliot's Adam Bede." She began collecting information on the subject when she created a panel at the Southern Conference of British Studies in 2000 titled "Animals in Victorian Literature" and presented "The Iconization of Animals in Victorian Culture." Two years later she spoke on "Beast on a Leash: Victorian Dominion over the Animal Kingdom" at the Mid-Atlantic Popular Conference.
List of Figures
Preface and Acknowledgments
Introduction: Beast on a Leash
BRENDA AYRES
1 Gaskell's Activism and Animal Agency
BRENDA AYRES
2 Old and New Beef: Caring for Animals in Household Words
LIAM YOUNG
3 George Eliot's Use of Horses in Measuring the Moral Maturity of Characters in Her Novels
CONSTANCE M. FULMER
4 Pigs in Great Expectations: Class, Dehumanization, and Marxist Animal Studies
JESSICA KUSKEY
5 Ants, Insects, and Automatons: Classifying Creatures in Hardy's The Return of the Native
ANNA WEST
6 It's Raining Cats and Dogs in the Novels of George Eliot
BRENDA AYRES
7 A Fine Kettle of Fish: Cultural (and Culinary) Preservation in Anglo-Jewish Ghetto Stories
LINDSAY KATZIR
8 Gendered Metamorphoses in the Natural History Museum and Trans-Animality in Richard Marsh's The Beetle
PANDORA SYPEREK
9 The "Animality" of Speech and Translation in The Jungle Books
CHRISTIE HARNER
Notes on Contributors
Index