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theses

This dissertation charts a literary history of animal characters running through the novels of Charles Kingsley, Benjamin Disraeli, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy. It argues that this overlooked history requires rethinking realist character in light of recent debates about nonhuman beings occurring in philosophy, political theory, and the environmental humanities. Animals have long seemed like minor players in Victorian realism, a genre far more interested in the sprawling totality of human social relations. The marginal social position of animals, however, makes them invaluable instruments for exploring those questions of communal belonging central to the Victorian novel. Because they defy easy categorization as subjects or objects, persons or things, characters or mere scenery, animals shuffle between literary and philosophical categories with surprising ease over the course of the nineteenth century. Their movements provide a revealing perspective on the connections that link the literary construct of character to its ethical counterparts of the subject, the person, and above all, the human. As animals develop from symbols into characters before finally being subsumed into a monolithic understanding of nature as a nonhuman thing, they track the evolution of character itself as a mode of imagining personhood: its origins as a mark of sociopolitical distinction, its expansion into a much more flexible form of moral recognition, and its final contraction, by the turn of the twentieth century, into one more means of validating the individual human consciousness.

ETD_6264

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

by John MacNeill Miller

doi:10.7282/T30G3N0X

ETD doctoral

The author owns the copyright to this work.