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REPRESENTING ANIMAL MINDS IN EARLY ANIMAL AUTOBIOGRAPHY: CHARLOTTE TUCKER'S THE RAMBLES OF A RAT AND NINETEENTH-CENTURY NATURAL HISTORY

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2015

Julie A. Smith
Julie A. Smith*
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin, Whitewater (Retired)
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Extract

Animal autobiography – a first-person fictional narrative in which an animal tells its own story – emerged in the late eighteenth century as the first attempt to represent animal minds in extended narrative form. Authors of this genre were anxious to create accurate, believable animal characters, even as they afforded them human language and a habit of critical commentary. To do this, they wrote in sync with scientific understandings of animals as set out in books of natural history. A few authors are explicit about their debt to natural history, and their comments point to a broad but intended compatibility between the ideas of animal minds in animal autobiography and those in the popularized scientific discourse of the day.

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 43 , Issue 4 , December 2015 , pp. 725 - 744
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

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