Animal Stories: Narrating across Species Lines (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780816670338)

Beginning with a historical account of why animal stories pose endemic critical challenges to literary and cultural theory, Animal Stories argues that key creative developments in narrative form became inseparable from shifts in animal politics and science in the past century. Susan McHugh traces representational patterns specific to modern and contemporary fictions of cross-species companionship through a variety of media--including novels, films, fine art, television shows, and digital games--to show how nothing less than the futures of all species life is at stake in narrative forms.
McHugh's investigations into fictions of people relying on animals in civic and professional life--most obviously those of service animal users and female professional horse riders--showcase distinctly modern and human-animal forms of intersubjectivity. But increasingly graphic violence directed at these figures indicates their ambivalent significance to changing configurations of species.
Reading these developments with narrative adaptations of traditional companion species relations during this period-- queer pet memoirs and farm animal fictions--McHugh clarifies the intercorporeal intimacies--the perforations of species boundaries now proliferating in genetic and genomic science--and embeds the representation of animals within biopolitical frameworks.

Author: Susan McHugh
ISBN-10: 0816670331
ISBN-13: 9780816670338
Publisher: University of Minnesota Press
Language: English
Published: 04/12/2011
Pages: 336
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.80lbs
Size: 8.40h x 5.40w x 0.70d

Review Citation(s):
Choice 11/01/2011
Reference and Research Bk News 08/01/2011 pg. 191