Animals in the American Classics

How Natural History Inspired Great Fiction
Erscheinungsjahr 2022
ISBN: 978-1-64843-020-6
Verlag: Texas A&M University Press

Buch, Englisch, 304 Seiten, Hardback, Format (B × H): 160 mm x 239 mm, Gewicht: 860 g

Reihe: Integrative Natural History Series, sponsored by Texas Research Institute for Environmental Studies, Sam Houston State University

As defined by conservation biologist Thomas Fleishner, natural history is “a practice of intentional, focused receptivity to the more-than-human world. one of the oldest continuous human traditions.” Seldom is this idea so clearly reflected as in classic works of American fiction of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.John Cullen Gruesser’s edited volume Animals in the American Classics: How Natural History Inspired Great Fiction features essays by prominent literary scholars that showcase natural history and the multifaceted role of animals in well-known works of fiction, from Washington Irving in the early nineteenth century to Cormac McCarthy in the late twentieth century, and including short stories and novels by Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Zora Neale Hurston, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Jack London, John Steinbeck, and Harper Lee.As an introduction to or a new way of thinking about some of the best-known and most beloved literary texts this nation has produced, Animals in the American Classics considers fundamental questions of ethics and animal intelligence as well as similarities among racism, ageism, misogyny, and speciesism.  With their awareness of Poe’s “more-than-casual knowledge of natural science,” Mark Twain’s proto–animal rights sensibilities, and Hurston’s training as an anthropologist, the contributors show that by drawing attention to and thinking like an animal, fiction tests the limits of humanity.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Gruesser, John Cullen

Fachgebiete

• Naturwissenschaften Biowissenschaften Biowissenschaften Biowissenschaften, Biologie: Sachbuch, Naturführer
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturwissenschaft

Über Autor(innen)

JOHN CULLEN GRUESSER is senior research scholar of literary studies at Sam Houston State University. He is the author of numerous books, including Edgar Allan Poe and His Nineteenth-Century American Counterparts and A Literary Life of Sutton E. Griggs The Man on the Firing Line, and coeditor, of the Broadview Edition of Pauline E. Hopkins’s novel Hagar’s Daughter.