Fictional Menageries: Writing Animals in the Early Twenty-First Century (original) (raw)

In 'On the Animal Turn', Harriet Ritvo notes that though 'learned attention to animals is far from new', stretching indeed as far back as Aristotle's Historia Animalium, 'nevertheless, during the last several decades, animals have emerged as a more frequent focus on scholarship in the humanities and social sciences, as quantified in published books and articles, conference presentations, new societies, and new journals.' 1 Before delving into Timothy C. Baker's Writing Animals, itself part of one of a scholarly series to have emerged in this budding field (Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature), it is useful to note a few things about the circumstances attending the field's rise. As its name clearly suggests, literary animal studies is a subset within the array of subfields within so-called 'critical animal studies', which also include ecology, philosophy, ethics, history, cognition and language studies, but also, and equally importantly, social justice and activist movements, from ones focused on preservation of habitats, the humane treatment of animals and the ban on industrial and medical exploitation and cruelty to positive animal rights in freedom and dignity, to vegetarianism and veganism. Institutionally, as we learn from the accounts of Nik Taylor and Richard Twine, as well as Anthony J. Nocella II et al., critical animal studies grew out of nineteenth-century interventions like Henry Salt's Animals' Rights Considered in Relation to Moral Progress of 1894 and the post WW2 confluence between animal rights and other social justice movements as reflected in Peter Singer's foundational Animal Liberation of 1975, until they led to the foundation of the Center on Animal Liberation Affairs in 2001 and the Institute for Critical Animal Studies in 2007. The affiliated Journal for Critical Animal Studies was re-launched in the same year as a follow-up to its previous incarnation, the Animal Liberation Philosophy and