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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