Homeless dogs & melancholy apes : humans and other animals in the modern literary imagination /

Homeless dogs & melancholy apes : humans and other animals in the modern literary imagination /

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Bibliographic Details
Author / Creator:Brown, Laura, 1949-
Imprint:Ithaca, N.Y. : Cornell University Press, 2010.
Description:1 online resource (xi, 156 pages) : illustrations
Language:English
Subject:
English literature -- History and criticism.
American literature -- History and criticism.
Animals in literature.
Human-animal relationships in literature.
Pets in literature.
American literature.
Animals in literature.
English literature.
Human-animal relationships in literature.
Pets in literature.
Electronic book.
Criticism, interpretation, etc.
Format: E-Resource Book
URL for this record:http://pi.lib.uchicago.edu/1001/cat/bib/11403619
Hidden Bibliographic Details
Varying Form of Title:Homeless dogs and melancholy apes
ISBN:9780801462160
0801462169
9780801448287
080144828X
Digital file characteristics:data file
Notes:Includes bibliographical references and index.
Print version record.
Summary:""I read Homeless Dogs and Melancholy Apes with great eagerness and found it to be a book of compelling interest, wonderful erudition, and nuanced, sophisticated analysis. It brings innovative perspectives and contexts to bear on core eighteenth-century topics and texts. Laura Brown takes up a leading concern in contemporary cultural studies--human-animal relations--and shows how modernity's paradigms of difference and alterity were articulated in the eighteenth century in ways sharply continous with our own."--Erin Mackie, Syracuse University" ""Homeless Dogs and Melancholy Apes engages with the long-standing conversation about otherness and also with the more recent and very lively conversation among humanists about animals. Laura Brown's work enhances understanding of how an important facet of eighteenth-century culture influenced and was incorporated into eighteenth-century literature."--Harriet Ritvo, Arthur J. Conner Professor of History, MIT" "In eighteenth-century England, the encounter between humans and other animals took a singular turn with the discovery of the great apes and the rise of bourgeois pet keeping. These historical changes created a new cultural and intellectual context for the understanding and representation of animal-kind, and the nonhuman animal has thus played a significant role in imaginative literature from that period to the present day. In Homeless Dogs and Melancholy Apes, Laura Brown shows how the literary works of the eighteenth century used animal-kind to bring abstract philosophical, ontological, and metaphysical questions into the realm of everyday experience, affording a uniquely, flexible perspective on difference, hierarchy, intimacy, diversity, and transcendence."
"Writers of this first age of the rise of the animal in the modern literary imagination used their nonhuman characters--from the lapdogs of Alexander Pope and his contemporaries to the ill-mannered monkey of Frances Burney's Evelina or the ape-like Yahoos of Jonathan Swift--to explore questions of human identity and self-definition, human love and the experience of intimacy, and human diversity and the boundaries of convention. Later writers continued to use imaginary animals to question human conventions of form and thought. Brown pursues this engagement with animal-kind into the nineteenth century--through works by Mary Shelley, Charles Dickens, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning--and into the twentieth, with a concluding account of Paul Auster's dog-novel, Timbuktu. Auster's work suggests that--today as in the eighteenth century--imagining other animals opens up a potential for dissonance that creates distinctive opportunities for human creativity."--Jacket.
Other form:Print version: Brown, Laura, 1949- Homeless dogs & melancholy apes. Ithaca, N.Y. : Cornell University Press, 2010
Review by Choice Review

Although the full title of Brown's book implies a broader scope than it delivers, the volume represents an important contribution to the burgeoning field of animal studies. Also author of Fables of Modernity (CH, Feb'02, 39-3234) and Ends of Empire (1993), Brown (Cornell) makes a few forays into the 19th and 20th centuries but for the most part explores 18th-century texts that use animals to interrogate, as she writes in her introduction, "the nature of the human, the definition of love, the experience of diversity, and the possibility of transcendence." The author offers brief analyses of canonical literature, including Alexander Pope's The Rape of the Lock, Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, and Fanny Burney's anonymously published Evelina. However, her focus tends toward noncanonical texts, for example, Edward Tyson's Anatomy of a Pygmie (1699), a strategy that may reduce the book's usefulness to less experienced readers. Nevertheless, this carefully researched, clearly written study offers a helpful theoretical overview of recent work on the animal-human relationship. In addition, Brown provides an important and insightful chapter on the "dog narrative" and its continuing place in literary history. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. R. D. Morrison Morehead State University

Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review

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