In this Book

buy this book Buy This Book in Print
summary
Originally published in 1985. Beasts of the Modern Imagination explores a specific tradition in modern thought and art: the critique of anthropocentrism at the hands of "beasts"—writers whose works constitute animal gestures or acts of fatality. It is not a study of animal imagery, although the works that Margot Norris explores present us with apes, horses, bulls, and mice who appear in the foreground of fiction, not as the tropes of allegory or fable, but as narrators and protagonists appropriating their animality amid an anthropocentric universe. These beasts are finally the masks of the human animals who create them, and the textual strategies that bring them into being constitute another version of their struggle. The focus of this study is a small group of thinkers, writers, and artists who create as the animal—not like the animal, in imitation of the animal—but with their animality speaking. The author treats Charles Darwin as the founder of this tradition, as the naturalist whose shattering conclusions inevitably turned back on him and subordinated him, the rational man, to the very Nature he studied. Friedrich Nietzsche heeded the advice implicit in his criticism of David Strauss and used Darwinian ideas as critical tools to interrogate the status of man as a natural being. He also responded to the implications of his own animality for his writing by transforming his work into bestial acts and gestures. The third, and last, generation of these creative animals includes Franz Kafka, the Surrealist artist Max Ernst, and D. H. Lawrence. In exploring these modern philosophers of the animal and its instinctual life, the author inevitably rebiologizes them even against efforts to debiologize thinkers whose works can be studied profitably for their models of signification.

Table of Contents

Download PDF Download Full Book Download EPUB Download Full EPUB
  1. Cover
  2. open access
    • HTML icon View
    • PDF icon Download
  1. New Copyright
  2. open access
    • HTML icon View
    • PDF icon Download
  1. Half Title 1
  2. p. i
  3. open access
    • HTML icon View
    • PDF icon Download
  1. Frontispiece
  2. p. ii
  3. open access
    • HTML icon View
    • PDF icon Download
  1. Title Page
  2. p. iii
  3. open access
    • HTML icon View
    • PDF icon Download
  1. Copyright
  2. p. iv
  3. open access
    • HTML icon View
    • PDF icon Download
  1. Epigraph
  2. p. v
  3. open access
    • HTML icon View
    • PDF icon Download
  1. Contents
  2. p. vii
  3. open access
    • HTML icon View
    • PDF icon Download
  1. Acknowledgments
  2. p. ix
  3. open access
    • HTML icon View
    • PDF icon Download
  1. Abbreviations
  2. pp. xi-xii
  3. open access
    • HTML icon View
    • PDF icon Download
  1. Half Title 2
  2. p. xiii
  3. open access
    • HTML icon View
    • PDF icon Download
  1. 1. Introduction: The Biocentric Tradition
  2. pp. 1-25
  3. open access
    • HTML icon View
    • PDF icon Download
  1. 2. Darwin’s Reading of Nature
  2. pp. 26-52
  3. open access
    • HTML icon View
    • PDF icon Download
  1. 3. Darwin, Nietzsche, Kafka, and the Problem of Mimesis
  2. pp. 53-72
  3. open access
    • HTML icon View
    • PDF icon Download
  1. 4. Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo: Behold the Beast
  2. pp. 73-100
  3. open access
    • HTML icon View
    • PDF icon Download
  1. 5. The Fate of the Human Animal in Kafka’s Fiction
  2. pp. 101-117
  3. open access
    • HTML icon View
    • PDF icon Download
  1. 6. Kafka’s “Josefine”: The Animal as the Negative Site of Narration
  2. pp. 118-133
  3. open access
    • HTML icon View
    • PDF icon Download
  1. 7. Max Ernst: The Rhetorical Beast of the Visual Arts
  2. pp. 134-169
  3. open access
    • HTML icon View
    • PDF icon Download
  1. 8. The Ontology of D. H. Lawrence’s St. Mawr
  2. pp. 170-194
  3. open access
    • HTML icon View
    • PDF icon Download
  1. 9. The Animal and Violence in Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon
  2. pp. 195-219
  3. open access
    • HTML icon View
    • PDF icon Download
  1. 10. Conclusion: The Biocentric Tradition in Context
  2. pp. 220-238
  3. open access
    • HTML icon View
    • PDF icon Download
  1. Notes
  2. pp. 239-256
  3. open access
    • HTML icon View
    • PDF icon Download
  1. Index
  2. pp. 257-265
  3. open access
    • HTML icon View
    • PDF icon Download
  1. About the Author
  2. p. 266
  3. open access
    • HTML icon View
    • PDF icon Download
Back To Top