What Animals Mean in the Fiction of Modernity

by Philip Armstrong

What Animals Mean in the Fiction of Modernity argues that nonhuman animals, and stories about them, have always been closely bound up with the conceptual and material work of modernity. In the first half of the book, Philip Armstrong examines the function of animals and animal representations in four classic Robinson Crusoe , Gulliver’s Travels , Frankenstein and Moby-Dick . He then goes on to explore how these stories have been re-worked, in ways that reflect shifting social and environmental forces, by later novelists, including H.G. Wells, Upton Sinclair, D.H. Lawrence, Ernest Hemingway, Franz Kafka, Brigid Brophy, Bernard Malamud, Timothy Findley, Will Self, Margaret Atwood, Yann Martel and J.M. Coetzee. What Animals Mean in the Fiction of Modernity also introduces readers to new developments in the study of human-animal relations. It does so by attending both to the significance of animals to humans, and to animals’ own purposes or designs; to what animals mean to us, and to what they mean to do, and how they mean to live.

264 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2007

About the author

Professor of English

Reviews

[Cameron · Rating 3 out of 5]

A decent, if occasionally digressive survey of how historical moments informed fiction about "animal meaning" since Swift and Defoe. Armstrong's central argument (one at the heart of recent animal studies work, promulgated especially by Erica Fudge) is that fiction, along with other texts, bears irreducible "tracks" (zing!) of *historical* animal agency.

I imagine some critics might be a little grumpy that Armstrong ignores issues of textuality and the theoretical peculiarity of literature's space in cultures, to say nothing of his near-constant, unproblematic assumption of an ideal, contemporary reader's mindset. More careful consideration of some the fraught postcolonial politics of the texts-at-hand might also have been desirable, subjectively speaking.

His chapter on Moby-Dick, "Rendering the Whale," is, by far, the stand-out piece of the text. It shows a sophistication and focus I feel the rest of the book might occasionally lack.