Animal Presence and Human Identity in Modern Literature

Auteur

Kimberly W. Benston is Francis B. Gummere Professor of English and Africana Studies at Haverford College, where he has also served as Provost and President.

Texte du rabat

Animal Presence and Human Identity in Modern Literature is an exploration of literary representations of the human-animal encounter in modernity that press human "being" to its limits. Texts studied include Shakespeare's King Lear, Eliot's Middlemarch, Wells's The Island of Doctor Moreau, Atwood's Surfacing, and Desai's Clear Light of Day.

Contenu

Introduction: Literature and "The Animal" As Such; "Why Should a Dog, a Horse, a Rat Have Life?": King Lear and the Ethics of Encounter; "The Roar on the Other Side of Silence": Middlemarch and Sympathetic Imagination; "When Suffering Finds a Voice": The Island of Doctor Moreau and the Language of Pain; "The Power to Kill": Surfacing and the Ethics of Abject Humanimality; "Eat Your Meat": Clear Light of Day and the Borderlands of Animal Ethics; Conclusion: Toward an Ethics of Humanimality as First Philosophy.