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.
Les mer
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.
Les mer
AcknowledgmentsIntroduction. Life in the Built EnvironmentChapter 1. Animal Bodies: Corporeality, Class, and Equestrianism in Susan Warner's The Wide, Wide WorldChapter 2. Animal Transformations: Sagacious Dogs, Disgusting Apes, Evolutionary Theory, and Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Marble FawnChapter 3. The Domestic Angel Animal: Nature, Nurture, and Difference in the Work of Harriet Beecher StoweChapter 4. Animal Justice: Charles W. Chesnutt, Black Animality, and the Politics of Animal WelfareConclusion: Animal Politics, Affect, and American StudiesNotesIndex
Les mer
Intelligent, ambitious... Thoughtful and carefully written and should spur more work along the same lines. -- Nina Baym New England Quarterly 2006 Civilized Creatures is a thought-provoking contribution to our understanding of the nineteenth-century politics of affect. -- Glenn Hendler Journal of American History 2006
Les mer

Produktdetaljer

ISBN
9780801880711
Publisert
2005-09-29
Utgiver
Vendor
Johns Hopkins University Press
Vekt
454 gr
Høyde
229 mm
Bredde
152 mm
Dybde
22 mm
Aldersnivå
G, 01
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Innbundet
Antall sider
240

Forfatter

Biographical note

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