Talking Animals in British Children's Fiction, 1786–1914In her reappraisal of canonical works such as Black Beauty, Beautiful Joe, Wind in the Willows, and Peter Rabbit, Tess Cosslett traces how nineteenth-century debates about the human and animal intersected with, or left their mark on, the venerable genre of the animal story written for children. Effortlessly applying a range of critical approaches, from Bakhtinian ideas of the carnivalesque to feminist, postcolonial, and ecocritical theory, she raises important questions about the construction of the child reader, the qualifications of the implied author, and the possibilities of children's literature compared with literature written for adults. Perhaps most crucially, Cosslett examines how the issues of animal speech and animal subjectivity were managed, at a time when the possession of language and consciousness had become a vital sign of the difference between humans and animals. Topics of great contemporary concern, such as the relation of the human and the natural, masculine and feminine, child and adult, are investigated within their nineteenth-century contexts, making this an important book for nineteenth-century scholars, children's literature specialists, and historians of science and childhood. |
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Contents
7 | |
Fabulous Histories and Papillonades | 33 |
Parables and Fairytales | 47 |
Wild Animal Stories | 75 |
Arcadias? | |
Afterword | |
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adult Adventures analogy animal autobiography animal language animal speech animal stories Anthropomorphism Barbauld beasts Beatrix Potter Beautiful Joe Benson birds Black Beauty carnivalesque chapter characters childhood children's books Children's Literature Children's Literature Association clothes comic creatures Darwin device Dick Donkey Dorothy Kilner Dorset Education eighteenth-century emphasise evolutionary Fables Fabulous Histories female Gatty's Grahame Grahame's hierarchy horse human Ibid idea illustration Jemmy John Lockwood Kingsley Kingsley's Kipling Kipling's London male Margaret Gatty masquerade metaphor mice Mole moral mother mouse Mowgli narrative narrator natural historical information natural history Natural Theology naturalist papillonades Parables parents Peacock at Home Peter Rabbit poems robins Sarah Trimmer scientific Second Jungle Book seen servants Seton Sewell social speak sympathy tale talking animals tell Tennyson Tiggy-winkle Toad Tommy Trimmer Tuppy understand University Press Victorian voice Water Babies wild animal Willows Wind Wollstonecraft women writers