Animals and Other People by Heather Keenleyside - 9780812248579

Animals and Other PeopleLiterary Forms and Living Beings in the Long Eighteenth Century\nAuthor(s): Heather Keenleyside\nFormat: Hardback\nPublisher: University of Pennsylvania Press, United States\nImprint: University of Pennsylvania Press\nISBN-13: 9780812248579, 978-0812248579\nSynopsis\nIn Animals and Other People, Heather Keenleyside argues for the central role of literary modes of knowledge in apprehending animal life. Keenleyside focuses on writers who populate their poetry, novels, and children's stories with conspicuously figurative animals, experiment with conventional genres like the beast fable, and write the \""lives\"" of mice as well as men. From such writers-including James Thomson, Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift, Laurence Sterne, Anna Letitia Barbauld, and others-she recovers a key insight about the representation of living beings: when we think and write about animals, we are never in the territory of strictly literal description, relying solely on the evidence of our s.