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. Prologue: Uplifting Animals; Chapter 1 Looking Up, Looking Down: Orientations of the Human; ''Godlike Erect''; ''Going the Whole Orang'': The Post-Darwinian Fable; The Darwinian Grotesque; Franz Kafka, Fabulist; The Aesopian Grotesque; Chapter 2 The Grotesque Mouth; ''Might Sovereignty Be Devouring?''; Aesop's Symposium of Animal Tongues; On Eating God: The Theological Fables of T. F. Powys; Chapter 3 ''The Highest Civilisation among Ants'': Stevenson and the Fable Ant TheologyFrog Perspective; Ape Perspective; Chapter 4 ''An Animal among the Animals'': Wells and the Thought of the Future; The Discovery of the Future; Animalizing the Present; The Island of Doctor Moreau; A Topological Fable; Chapter 5 Animal Bachelors and Animal Brides: Kafka, Carter, Garnett; Perforating the Human; Animal Masquerades; ''Animals Are Closer to Us Than Human Beings''; Chapter 6 Scapegoats and Scapegraces: Becoming Sacrificial Animal in Kafka and Coetzee; Scapegoat: The Narrative Animal; What Is It Like to Be a Scapegoat? Elizabeth Costello and Red Peter Difficult Comparisons''Like a Dog . . . Like a Lamb'': Becoming Sacrificial Animal in Disgrace; From Scapegoat to Scapegrace; Coda: ''Diogenes of the Zoo''; References; Index