| Contents |
Foreword, by William I. Lutterschmidt -- Animal Analogues and the Character of American Wildlife in Washington Irving's "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" /William E. Engel -- "At the same time more and less than a man": The Ourang-Outang in Edgar Allan Poe's "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" / Philip Edward Phillips -- Insects, Metamorphosis, and Poe's "The Gold-Bug" / Susan Elizabeth Sweeney -- Whales, Mother Carey's Chickens, and a Heart-Stricken Moose in Herman Melville's MobyDick / Brian Yothers -- Mark Twain's "Jumping Frog": Cartoon Fantasy and Grim Reality in the Animal Kingdom / John Bird -- Learning to Think like an Animal: Pragmatism in Jack London's The Call of the Wild / Anthony Reynolds -- A "Background Never Stated": Mice, Snakes, Dogs, and Rabbits in John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men / Barbara A. Heavilin -- High Water and the Limits of Humanity in Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God / Cherene Sherrard-Johnson -- Faulkner's Animals: Testing the Limits of the Human / -- Deborah Clarke -- A Natural History of the Blue Marlin in Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea / Susan F. Beegel -- Mad Dogs and Maycomb: Harper Lee's Guide to an Ambiguous South in To Kill a Mockingbird / Robert Donahoo -- Gatelamps to Another World: Seeing the Animal in Cormac McCarthy / Stacey Peebles -- Contributors. |
| Abstract |
"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, 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"-- Provided by publisher. |
