Homeless Dogs and Melancholy Apes: Humans and Other Animals in the Modern Literary Imagination

by Laura S. Brown

Overview

In eighteenth-century England, the encounter between humans and other animals took a singular turn with the discovery of the great apes and the rise of bourgeois pet keeping. These historical changes created a new cultural and intellectual context for the understanding and representation of animal-kind, and the nonhuman animal has thus played a significant role in imaginative literature from that period to the present day. In Homeless Dogs and Melancholy Apes, Laura Brown shows how the literary works of the eighteenth century use animal-kind to bring abstract philosophical, ontological, and metaphysical questions into the realm of everyday experience, affording a uniquely flexible perspective on difference, hierarchy, intimacy, diversity, and transcendence.

Writers of this first age of the rise of the animal in the modern literary imagination used their nonhuman characters—from the lapdogs of Alexander Pope and his contemporaries to the ill-mannered monkey of Frances Burney's Evelina or the ape-like Yahoos of Jonathan Swift—to explore questions of human identity and self-definition, human love and the experience of intimacy, and human diversity and the boundaries of convention. Later literary works continued to use imaginary animals to question human conventions of form and thought. Brown pursues this engagement with animal-kind into the nineteenth century—through works by Mary Shelley, Charles Dickens, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning—and into the twentieth, with a concluding account of Paul Auster's dog-novel, Timbuktu. Auster's work suggests that—today as in the eighteenth century—imagining other animals opens up a potential for dissonance that creates distinctive opportunities for human creativity.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781501713552
Publisher:	Cornell University Press
Publication date:	01/31/2017
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	176
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.90(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Laura Brown is John Wendell Anderson Professor of English at Cornell University. She is the author of several books, including Fables of Modernity: Literature and Culture in the English Eighteenth Century and Ends of Empire: Women and Ideology in Early Eighteenth-Century English Literature, also from Cornell.

Table of Contents

Preface
1 Speculative Space: The Rise of the Animal in the Modern Imagination
2 Mirror Scene: The Orangutan, the Ancients, and the Cult of Sensibility
3 Immoderate Love: The Lady and the Lapdog
4 Violent Intimacy: The Monkey and the Marriage Plot
5 Dog Narrative: Itinerancy, Diversity, and the Elysium of Dogs
Index

What People are Saying About This

Erin Mackie

I read Homeless Dogs and Melancholy Apes with great eagerness and found it to be a book of compelling interest, wonderful erudition, and nuanced, sophisticated analysis. It brings innovative perspectives and contexts to bear on core eighteenth-century topics and texts. Laura Brown takes up a leading concern in contemporary cultural studies—human-animal relations—and shows how modernity's paradigms of difference and alterity were articulated in the eighteenth century in ways sharply continuous with our own.

Harriet Ritvo

Homeless Dogs and Melancholy Apes engages with the long-standing conversation about otherness and also with the more recent and very lively conversation among humanists about animals. Laura Brown's work enhances understanding of how an important facet of eighteenth-century culture influenced and was incorporated into eighteenth-century literature.

Editorial Reviews

In this delicate and sophisticated book, Laura Brown... seeks to restore lost or neglected dimensions of the interplay between animal and human. She focuses on representations of apes, pet monkeys, and lapdogs, and finally turns her attention to fictions narrated by dogs—a Cervantean tradition that has prospered, thanks lately to Paul Auster and Andrew O' Hagan, into the present.... Apes, though impugned sometimes as rapists, were also credited with the most delicate sensitivities, including modesty, honor, and justice, and Brown captures the excitement of their gradual discovery through the imaginative flights that attended it.

Times Literary Supplement - Jennie Erin Smith

"I read Homeless Dogs and Melancholy Apes with great eagerness and found it to be a book of compelling interest, wonderful erudition, and nuanced, sophisticated analysis. It brings innovative perspectives and contexts to bear on core eighteenth-century topics and texts. Laura Brown takes up a leading concern in contemporary cultural studies—human-animal relations—and shows how modernity's paradigms of difference and alterity were articulated in the eighteenth century in ways sharply continuous with our own."

Erin Mackie

"Homeless Dogs and Melancholy Apes engages with the long-standing conversation about otherness and also with the more recent and very lively conversation among humanists about animals. Laura Brown's work enhances understanding of how an important facet of eighteenth-century culture influenced and was incorporated into eighteenth-century literature."

Harriet Ritvo

In this delicate and sophisticated book, Laura Brown... seeks to restore lost or neglected dimensions of the interplay between animal and human. She focuses on representations of apes, pet monkeys, and lapdogs, and finally turns her attention to fictions narrated by dogs--a Cervantean tradition that has prospered, thanks lately to Paul Auster and Andrew O' Hagan, into the present.... Apes, though impugned sometimes as rapists, were also credited with the most delicate sensitivities, including modesty, honor, and justice, and Brown captures the excitement of their gradual discovery through the imaginative flights that attended it.

--Jennie Erin Smith "Times Literary Supplement"

From the Publisher