The Political Lives of Victorian Animals
Liberal Creatures in Literature and Culture
Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture Series

During the Victorian era, animals were increasingly viewed not as property or utility, but as thinking, feeling subjects worthy of inclusion within a political community. This book re-examines the nineteenth-century British animal welfare movement and animal characters in the Victorian novel in light of liberal thought, and argues that liberalism was a decisive factor in determining the cultural, ideological, and material makeup of animal-human relationships. While the animal welfare movement often represented animals as desiring submission to the human, animal characters in the Victorian novel critiqued the liberal norms that led to the oppression of both animals and humans. Through readings of animal rights legislation, animal welfare texts, and writings by Charles Dickens, Lewis Carroll, Thomas Hardy, and Olive Schreiner, Anna Feuerstein outlines the remarkably powerful political role that animals played in the Victorian novel, as they offer ways to move beyond the exclusionary and contradictory strategies of liberal thought.

Introduction: the political lives of Victorian animals; Part I. Anti-Cruelty Legislation and Animal Welfare: 1. The government of animals: anti-cruelty legislation and the making of liberal creatures; 2. The incessant care of the Victorian shepherd: animal welfare's pastoral power; Part II. Democracy, Education, and Alternative Subjectivity: 3. 'Tame submission to injustice is unworthy of a Raven': Charles Dickens's animal character; 4. Alice in Wonderland's animal pedagogy: democracy and alternative subjectivity in mid-Victorian liberal education; Part III. The Biopolitics of Animal Capital: 5. Animal capital and the lives of sheep: Thomas Hardy's biopolitical realism; 6. The political lives of animals in Victorian Empire: Oliver Schreiner's anti-colonial animal politics.

Anna Feuerstein is Assistant Professor at the University of Hawai'i-Manoa.