Animals and Their Children in Victorian Culture

Brenda Ayres, Sarah Elizabeth Maier, Brenda Ayres, Sarah Elizabeth Maier

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781032239590
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000760125
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Whether a secularized morality, biblical worldview, or unstated set of mores, the Victorian period can and always will be distinguished from those before and after for its pervasive sense of the "proper way" of thinking, speaking, doing, and acting. Animals in literature taught Victorian children how to be behave. If you are a postmodern posthumanist, you might argue, "But the animals in literature did not write their own accounts." Animal characters may be the creations of writers' imagination, but animals did and do exist in their own right, as did and do humans. The original essays in Animals and Their Children in Victorian explore the representation of animals in children's literature by resisting an anthropomorphized perception of them. Instead of focusing on the domestication of animals, this book analyzes how animals in literature "civilize" children, teaching them how to get along with fellow creatures—both human and nonhuman.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Little Beasts on Tight Leashes
• 1 Why Did the Cow Jump Over the Moon? Animals (But Mostly Pussies) in Nursery Rhymes
• 2 Wanted Dead or Alive: Rabbits in Victorian Children’s Literature
• 3 “In Friendly Chat with Bird or Beast … Mixing Together Things Grave and Gay”: Desireful Animals and Humans in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass
• 4 A Brotherhood of Wolves: Loyalty in Yiddish and Anglo-Jewish Folktales
• 5 Advocating for the Least of These: Empowering Children and Animals in The Band of Mercy Advocate
• 6 Bush Animals, Developmental Time, and Colonial Identity in Victorian Australian Children’s Fiction
• 7 The Serpent; or, the Real King of the Jungle
• 8 Learning Masculinity: Education, Boyhood, and the Animal in Thomas Hughes’s Tom Brown’s School Days
• 9 Unruly Females on the Farm: Domestic Animal Mothers and the Dismantling of the Species Hierarchy in Nineteenth-Century Literature for Children
• 10 The Child Is Father of the Man: Lessons Animals Teach Children in George Eliot’s Writings
• 11 Neither Brutes nor Beasts: Animals, Children, and Young Persons and/in the Brontës
• 12 Children, Animals, and the Fantasies of the Circus
• 13 Imperial Pets: Monkey-Girls, Man-Cubs, and Dog-Faced Boys on Exhibition in Victorian Britain
• Note on Contributors
• Index