Animal Fables after Darwin

Chris Danta is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of New South Wales, Sydney. He is the author of Literature Suspends Death: Sacrifice and Storytelling in Kierkegaard, Kafka and Blanchot (2011) and the co-editor of Strong Opinions: J. M. Coetzee and the Authority of Contemporary Fiction (2011) and Mindful Aesthetics: Literature and the Science of Mind (2013). He has published articles in New Literary History, Modernism/modernity, Angelaki, Textual Practice, Sub-Stance, and Literature & Theology.

'Chris Danta's engaging study of post-Darwinian fables represents the culmination of over a decade's research into the relationship between human and nonhuman animals. It synthesises and develops ideas put forward in some of his earlier published works, and overall his book comes across as cohesive, persuasive, and refreshingly original.' Janette Leaf, The British Society for Literature and Science

• Prologue: uplifting animals; 1. Looking up, looking down: orientations of the human; 2. The grotesque mouth; 3. 'The highest civilisation among ants': Stevenson and the fable; 4. 'An animal among the animals': Wells and the thought of the future; 5. Animal bachelors and animal brides: Kafka, Carter, Garnett; 6. Scapegoats and scapegraces: becoming sacrificial animal in Kafka and Coetzee; Coda: 'Diogenes of the zoo'.