Animals in Victorian Literature and Culture

Laurence W. Mazzeno is President Emeritus of Alvernia University, USA. He is the author of critical reception studies on a number of British and American authors, editor of several essay collections, reviews editor for Nineteenth-Century Prose and academic editor for two editions of the fourteen-volume Masterplots series.Ronald D. Morrison is Professor of English at Morehead State University, USA.  He is co-editor, with Laurence W. Mazzeno, of Victorian Writers and the Environment: Ecocritical Perspectives (2016).  He has published essays on Thomas Hardy, Christina Rossetti, and Richard Jefferies, among other authors.

“Animals in Victorian Literature and Culture: Contexts for Criticism … contribute to the entangled history of human-animal relations in nineteenth- century Britain and illuminate the role of culture in its entanglements. … the literary representation of animals makes visible the fictionality of our relation to animals: animals are real, to be sure, but that seems incidental to the ways in which we relate to them.” (Mario Ortiz-Robles, Victorian Studies, Vol. 61 (1), 2019)“Thanks to the excellent editorial work of Mazzeno (president emer., Alvernia Univ.) and Morrison (Morehead State Univ.), this assemblage of essays about the depiction and treatment of animals in the Victorian era adds a significant dimension to the growing interdisciplinary research on the subject. … Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers.” (L. A. Brewer, Choice, Vol. 55 (10), June, 2018)

• Introduction.- Part I: Animals in the Victorians’ World.- 1. Ann C. Colley, “Collecting the Live and the Skinned”.- 2.Ronald D. Morrison, “Dickens, Household Words, and the Smithfield Controversy at the Time of the Great Exhibition”.- 3. Grace Moore, “‘Beasts, Birds, Fishes, and Reptiles’: Anthony Trollope and the Australian Acclimatization Debate”.- 4. Susan Hamilton, “Dogs’ Homes and Lethal Chambers, or, What was it like to be a Battersea Dog?”.- Part II: Animals in the Victorians’ Literature.- 5. Jennifer McDonell, “Bull’s-eye, Agency and the Species Divide in Oliver Twist: a Cur’s-Eye View”.- 6. Antonia Losano, “Performing Animals/Performing Humanity”.- 7. Monica Flegel, “‘I declare I never saw so lovely an animal!’: Beauty, Individuality, and Objectification in Nineteenth-Century Animal Autobiographies”.- 8. Susan Pyke, “Cathy’s Whip and Heathcliff’s Snarl: Control, Violence, Care,and Rights in Wuthering Heights”.- 9. John Miller, “Creatures on the ‘Night-Side of Nature’: James Thomson’s Melancholy Ethics”.- 10. Jed Mayer, “‘Come buy, come buy!’: Christina Rossetti and the Victorian Animal Market”.- 11. Kathyrn Yeniyurt, “Black Beauty: The Emotional Work of Pretend Play”.- 12. Elizabeth Effinger, “Insect Politics in Richard Marsh’s The Beetle”.- Sources for Further Study.- Editors and Contributors.- Index.