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.

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... nonhuman nature shaped American literature and culture . Mason argues that in the second half of the nineteenth century the most power- ful influence on Americans ' understanding of their affinities with animals was not increasing ...
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... nonhuman world , these forces also brought people into new proximities with animal life . This claim is borne out by Nathaniel Hawthorne's “ Little Annie's Rambles " ( 1835 , 1837 ) , a sketch first published nine years before the 1844 ...
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... nonhuman . It is true that in the past three decades no critical assertion has been subject to more , or more vigorous , challenges than the early- and mid - twentieth- century claims about the centrality of the wilderness romance to ...
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... nonhuman nature in the period between 1850 and 1900 remains predicated on having a nonstandard relation to American cul- ture - one that takes the form of a rejection ( however qualified or submerged ) of the sentimental and domestic ...
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... nonhuman yet leaves do- mesticated animals invisible as ever . A brief review of recent titles underscores my point ... nonhuman renders the nonhuman " unnatural . " To construct a critical narrative more accountable to " how LIFE ...

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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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