Animal Print: The Literary Production of Humane America.

Abstract

This dissertation considers how humane literary texts mediate animal-human relationships and how these relationships, in turn, shape the expressive modes in which they are rendered. In studies of three popular animal-protection genres from the late-nineteenth century, it reconstructs print media’s role in establishing a kindness-to-animals ethic in the United States. It then carries its topic forward in time with an examination of animal-human relationships in mystery fiction. The first chapter, a literary-historical inquiry into Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty (1877) and its North American “sequels,” establishes a link between children’s literacy and the production of humane subjects. Focusing on George Thorndike Angell and the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, this discussion explores the epistemological challenges confronting animal advocates who came of age in the moral-reform and abolitionist cultures of antebellum New England. A close examination of Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s antivivisection novels, in the second chapter, suggests that imaginative literature infused the American humane movement with a sense of urgency by exploiting the formal properties of the classic romance plot. Phelps’s stolen-pet narratives revealed, in ways that other discursive forms did not, how vivisection threatened to corrode the nation’s happy homes. The third chapter, which is devoted to a discussion of fin de siècle field guides, argues that tensions between the emerging science of ornithology and the recreational practice of birdwatching generated new cultural ideas about the place of birds and natural-history study in American life. Revising earlier ornithological histories focused on the museum and the wilderness, this discussion centers the home and the backyard as the hubs of ornithological knowledge production in the nineteenth century. The fourth chapter serves as an investigation into a contemporary mass-market animal genre: the cat mystery. By exploring the interplay between narrative technique and mass-marketing strategy, this discussion acknowledges the genre’s ailurophilic readers as co-producers of their favorite series as well as targets of territorial mystery purists. The dissertation concludes with a consideration of the interrelation between literacy, childhood, and animals in contemporary Reading Education Assistance Dogs (R.E.A.D.) programs.