Animal fables after Darwin : literature, speciesism, and metaphor /
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...
| Main Author: | |
|---|---|
| Format: | Book |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Cambridge ; New York :
Cambridge University Press,
[2018]
|
| Subjects: |
| Summary: | 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 readapted 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. |
|---|---|
| Physical Description: | ix, 216 pages ; 24 cm. |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references (pages 194-208) and index. |
| ISBN: | 9781108428200 1108428207 9781108449076 1108449077 |