What Animals Mean in the Fiction of Modernity [Paperback]

What Animals Mean in the Fiction of Modernityargues 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 narratives: Robinson Crusoe, Gullivers Travels, Frankensteinand 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 Modernityalso 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.

Introduction.  1. The Inhuman Fictions of Swift and Defoe  2. Gulliver, Frankenstein, Moreau  3. Rendering the Whale  4. Modernism and the Hunt for Redemption  5. Animal Refugees in the Ruins of Modernity

  Remarkable depth and breadth in its engagement with critical discussions of animals in modern fiction .

- Susan McHugh in Society & Animals 17.4 (2009): 363-7

An essential book for anyone involved in Animal Studies and everyone concerned with animals in literature .

- Marion Copeland in Humanimalia 1.1 (September 2009)

A magisterial reading of Moby-Dick appears in What Animals Mean lc)