Victorians and Their Animals ― Beast on a Leash

 Victorians and Their Animals: Beast on a Leash, investigates the notion that British Victorians did see themselves as naturally dominant species over other humans and over animals. They conscientiously, hegemonically were determined to rule those beneath them and the animal within themselves, albeit with varying degrees of success and failure. The articles in this collection apply posthuman and other theories, including queer, postcolonialism, deconstruction, and Marxism, in their exploration of Victorian attitudes toward animals. They study the biopolitical relationships between human and nonhuman animals in several key Victorian literary works. Some of this book’s chapters deal with animal ethics and moral aesthetics. Also being studied is the representation of animals in several Victorian novels as narrative devices to signify class status and gender dynamics, either to iterate socially acceptable mores or to satirize hypocrisy or breach of behavior or to voice social protest. All of the chapters analyze the interdependence of people and animals during the nineteenth century.

Dr. Brenda Ayres teaches in the graduate and undergraduate programs in English, Professional Writing, and Education for Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia. She published her first article on animals in Victorian literature in The George Eliot–George Henry Lewes Newsletter (Sept. 1991), titled "Dogs in George Eliot’s Adam Bede," and began collecting information on the subject ever since she created a panel at the Southern Conference of British Studies in 2000 titled "Animals in Victorian Literature," there presenting "The Iconization of Animals in Victorian Culture." Two years later she spoke on "Beast on a Leash: Victorian Dominion over the Animal Kingdom" at the Mid-Atlantic Popular Conference. She has published extensively in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature with to date of over 200 articles and 32 book publications, the most recent being Biographical Misrepresentations of British Women Writers: A Hall of Mirrors and the Long Nineteenth Century (Palgrave, 2017) and Betwixt and Between the Biographies of Mary Wollstonecraft (Anthem, 2017).