Civilized Creatures: Urban Animals, Sentimental Culture, and American Literature, 1850–1900

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JHU Press, 2005 M08 4 - 229 pages

In Civilized Creatures, Jennifer Mason challenges some of our most enduring ideas about how encounters with nonhuman nature shaped American literature and culture. Mason argues that in the second half of the nineteenth century the most powerful influence on Americans' understanding of their affinities with animals was not increasing separation from the pastoral and the wilderness; instead, it was the population's feelings about the ostensibly civilized animals they encountered in their daily lives.

Americans of diverse backgrounds, Mason shows, found it attractive as well as politic to imagine themselves as most closely connected to those creatures who shared humans' aptitude for civilized life. And to the minds of many in this period, national prosperity depended less on periodic exposure to untamed, wild nature than it did on the proper care and keeping of such animals within suburban and urban environments.

Combining literary analysis with cultural histories of equestrianism, petkeeping, and the animal welfare movement, Civilized Creatures offers new readings of works by Susan Warner, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Charles W. Chesnutt. In each case, Mason demonstrates that understanding contemporary relationships between humans and animals is essential for understanding the debates about gender, race, and cultural power enacted in these texts.

From inside the book

 

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Page 6
... belief that Thoreau's views were " representative " of contemporary thought in the usual sense of the term . Consider an essay by Perry Miller that first appeared in 1955 and was later republished in Nature's Nation ( 1967 ) , whose ...
Page 8
... belief in their cen- trality to creation in the face of the undeniably vexed state of relations between humans and animals in the postlapserian world , where animals not only defied humans but even attacked and ate them . From this ...
Page 10
... belief that domesticated animals were fundamentally different from and superior to wild animals shaped eigh- teenth- and nineteenth - century natural history writing in a variety of ways . Zoological writers " often ... treated the ...
Page 11
... Belief that the condition of being or not being domesticated represented a fundamental difference among animal species manifested itself in less direct ways as well . The author of A Compara- tive View of the State and Faculties of Man ...
Page 13
... belief animated the middle class's interest in recreation- al equestrianism and it explains why the keeping of companion animals and the prevention of cruelty to animals became national obsessions.40 The connection between the ...

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Civilized Creatures: Urban Animals, Sentimental Culture, and American ...
Jennifer Mason
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African American Angell animal protection animal welfare antebellum appear argues argument beast belief birds Black Beauty body Bouquet brute canine century chapter character Charles Chesnutt civilization contemporary creatures critical cruelty culture differences discourse discussion dog's domesticated animals Donatello Dumb Animals Ellen environment equestrian equine essay evolutionary explains female fiction Further references George George Angell Grandison Harriet Beecher Stowe Hawthorne Henry Bergh horse horsemanship Humane Education ideas insists John Kenyon Lamarck Lawrence Buell literary literature living mals Marble Faun Marrow of Tradition master middle-class mind Miriam monkeys moral Myrover Nathaniel Nathaniel Hawthorne natural history nineteenth nineteenth-century nonhuman novel orangutans physical politics popular Praxiteles quoted race racial readers reprint rhetoric riding satyrs sentimental Shaler slavery slaves Society species story Stowe's strategy Susan Susan Warner theory Thoreau tion Uncle Tom's Cabin University Press Warner Wide World wild animals wilderness woman women York young

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About the author (2005)

Jennifer Mason has taught English at Southern Methodist University and Skidmore College.

Bibliographic information

TitleCivilized Creatures: Urban Animals, Sentimental Culture, and American Literature, 1850–1900
Animals, History, Culture
AuthorJennifer Mason
Editionillustrated
PublisherJHU Press, 2005
ISBN0801880718, 9780801880711
Length229 pages
  
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