Animal Fables after Darwin: Literature, Speciesism, and Metaphor

Description

The ancient form of the animal fable, in which the characteristics of humans and animals are playfully and educationally intertwined, took on a wholly new meaning after Darwin's theory of evolution changed forever the relationship between humans and animals. In this original study, Chris Danta provides an important and original account of how the fable was adopted and re-adapted by nineteenth- and twentieth-century authors to challenge traditional views of species hierarchy. The rise of the biological sciences in the second half of the nineteenth century provided literary writers such as Robert Louis Stevenson, H. G. Wells, Franz Kafka, Angela Carter and J. M. Coetzee with new material for the fable. By interrogating the form of the fable, and through it the idea of human exceptionalism, writers asked new questions about the place of the human in relation to its biological milieu.

Chris Danta is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of New South Wales, Sydney. He is the author of Literature Suspends Death: Sacrifice and Storytelling in Kierkegaard, Kafka and Blanchot (2011) and the co-editor of Strong Opinions: J. M. Coetzee and the Authority of Contemporary Fiction (2011) and Mindful Aesthetics: Literature and the Science of Mind (2013). He has published articles in New Literary History, Modernism/modernity, Angelaki, Textual Practice, Sub-Stance, and Literature & Theology.

'Chris Danta's engaging study of post-Darwinian fables represents the culmination of over a decade's research into the relationship between human and nonhuman animals. It synthesises and develops ideas put forward in some of his earlier published works, and overall his book comes across as cohesive, persuasive, and refreshingly original.' Janette Leaf, The British Society for Literature and Science 'Chris Danta brilliantly demonstrates that attention to animal lives in the post-Darwinian fable has the potential to generate strong new readings, not only of a ubiquitous yet neglected genre in Anglo-American literary criticism, but also of an ensemble of texts that for too long have been read primarily as ciphers for purely human concerns.' Jennifer McDonell, Social Alternatives