I knew a dog once
Laura Richards’s Literary Animals and the Poetics of Animacy
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 6188335 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Verena Laschinger |
| Year | 2024 |
| Volume | 19 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Publication date | 2024-01-01 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | European Journal of American Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1991-9336 • E-ISSN: 1991-9336 |
| Publisher | OpenEdition (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.4000/12wau |
| OpenAlex | W4405290091 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 22 |
Stomping, crawling, buzzing, waddling through her works, animals are Laura E. Richards’s (1850–1943) main narrative fare, especially in her early works. For the most part figurations of humans and human affairs, Richards’s literary animals uphold the human-animal divide, abounding in anthropomorphism, anthropocentrism, and speciesism. Richards’s nonsense poem “Eletelephony” (1932), however, dynamically entangles the human, the animal, and the machine, pronouncing “pleasure in the confusion of boundaries” decades before Donna Haraway’s “A Manifesto for Cyborgs” (8). A first scholarly engagement with Richards’s modernist experimenting, the essay reads “Eletelephony” as an imagetext in tandem with Marguerite Davis’s original illustration, linking the nonsense poem to the animated cartoon
Anthropocentrism · Art · Environmental ethics · Literature · Narrative · Nonsense · Poetics · Poetry · Animal and Plant Science Education · Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Philosophy
| Highly cited | No |
|---|