In this Book
- Animal Stories: Narrating across Species Lines
- Book
- 2011
- Published by: University of Minnesota Press
- Series: Posthumanities
summary
Beginning with a historical account of why animal stories pose endemic critical challenges to literary and cultural theory, Animal Stories argues that key creative developments in narrative form became inseparable from shifts in animal politics and science in the past century. Susan McHugh traces representational patterns specific to modern and contemporary fictions of cross-species companionship through a variety of media—including novels, films, fine art, television shows, and digital games—to show how nothing less than the futures of all species life is at stake in narrative forms.
McHugh’s investigations into fictions of people relying on animals in civic and professional life—most obviously those of service animal users and female professional horse riders—showcase distinctly modern and human–animal forms of intersubjectivity. But increasingly graphic violence directed at these figures indicates their ambivalent significance to changing configurations of species.
Reading these developments with narrative adaptations of traditional companion species relations during this period— queer pet memoirs and farm animal fictions—McHugh clarifies the intercorporeal intimacies—the perforations of species boundaries now proliferating in genetic and genomic science—and embeds the representation of animals within biopolitical frameworks.
Table of Contents
Download Full Book
- Acknowledgments
- pp. ix-xii
- Part I. Intersubjective Fictions
- Part II. Intercorporeal Narratives
- Conclusion: Toward a Narrative Ethology
- pp. 211-220
Additional Information
ISBN
9780816676989
Related ISBN(s)
9780816670338
MARC Record
OCLC
798760970
Pages
336
Launched on MUSE
2014-01-01
Language
English
Open Access
No