Pet Projects: Animal Fiction and Taxidermy in the Nineteenth-Century Archive

Elizabeth Young

Published by Penn State University Press 2019

Pet Projects

Animal Fiction and Taxidermy in the Nineteenth-Century Archive

Elizabeth Young

Volume 14 in the series Animalibus: Of Animals and Cultures

https://doi.org/10.1515/9780271085111

Overview
Contents

About this book

In Pet Projects, Elizabeth Young joins an analysis of the representation of animals in nineteenth-century fiction, taxidermy, and the visual arts with a first-person reflection on her own scholarly journey. Centering on Margaret Marshall Saunders, a Canadian woman writer once famous for her animal novels, and incorporating Young’s own experience of a beloved animal’s illness, this study highlights the personal and intellectual stakes of a “pet project” of cultural criticism.

Young assembles a broad archive of materials, beginning with Saunders’s novels and widening outward to include fiction, nonfiction, photography, and taxidermy. She coins the term “first-dog voice” to describe the narrative technique of novels, such as Saunders’s Beautiful Joe, written in the first person from the perspective of an animal. She connects this voice to contemporary political issues, revealing how animal fiction such as Saunders’s reanimates nineteenth-century writing about both feminism and slavery. Highlighting the prominence of taxidermy in the late nineteenth century, she suggests that Saunders transforms taxidermic techniques in surprising ways that provide new forms of authority for women. Young adapts Freud to analyze literary representations of mourning by and for animals, and she examines how Canadian writers, including Saunders, use animals to explore race, ethnicity, and national identity. Her wide-ranging investigation incorporates twenty-first as well as nineteenth-century works of literature and culture, including recent art using taxidermy and contemporary film. Throughout, she reflects on the tools she uses to craft her analyses, examining the state of scholarly fields from feminist criticism to animal studies.

With a lively, first-person voice that highlights experiences usually concealed in academic studies by scholarly discourse—such as detours, zigzags, roadblocks, and personal experience—this unique and innovative book will delight animal enthusiasts and academics in the fields of animal studies, gender studies, American studies, and Canadian studies.

Author / Editor information

Young Elizabeth :

Elizabeth Young is Carl M. and Elsie A. Small Professor of English at Mount Holyoke College. She is the author of Black Frankenstein: The Making of an American Metaphor and Disarming the Nation: Women’s Writing and the American Civil War.

Reviews

“Pet Projects takes animal humanities research to new heights. Recovering the animal-advocacy stories of Canada’s first best-selling author, Margaret Marshall Saunders, Young also uses feminist personal criticism to frame a timely history of animal studies, one that calls out the desires of so many to invent the field, while at the same time identifying how its development has involved collaborative negotiations at the crossroads of disciplines.”
—Susan McHugh, author of Love in a Time of Slaughters: Human-Animal Stories Against Genocide and Extinction

“In this innovative and compelling study, Young . . . interweaves a first-person account of taking her golden retriever for cancer treatments with an exploration of the representation of animals in fiction and other cultural forms in 19th-century North America. Young uses Marshall Saunders’s best-selling novel Beautiful Joe (1894) as a touchstone to explore what she terms ‘first-dog voice’ used in fiction. Focusing on a technique she calls ‘literary taxidermy,’ the author explores a range of theoretical concerns that connect animal studies to discussions of race, gender, and national identity.”
—R. D. Morrison, Choice

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	v
Illustrations Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Introduction Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
1. First-Dog Voice Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	15
2. His Master’s Voice Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	47
3. Literary Taxidermy Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	81
4. Mounting and Mourning Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	127
5. Can Lit Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	165
Coda Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	203
Acknowledgments Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	223
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	225
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	259

Language: English
Publisher: Penn State University Press
Audience: Professional and scholarly;
Pages
- Main content: 280
Illustrations
- Illustrations: 35
- Images: 35
- Other: 35 illustrations
Keywords: animals; dogs; birds; taxidermy; nineteenth century literature; women writers; Canadian literature; Marshall Saunders; H.G. Wells; William Hornaday; Alfred Hitchcock; Kelly Reichardt; Sam Fuller; Nova Scotia

eBook

Published: December 17, 2019
ISBN: 9780271085111