Animal Fables after Darwin: Literature, Speciesism, and Metaphor
Jul 2018 · Cambridge University Press
Ebook
216
Pages
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About this ebook
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.
About the author
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.
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