They’d Eaten Every One”

Food Anthropomorphism in “The Walrus and the Carpenter”

Bibliographic Data

ID8865832
AuthorsChristopher Kelen (Department of English, Faculty of Arts and Humanities, University of Macau, Taipa, Macau, China), Chengcheng You (0000-0001-9403-7346, Department of English, Faculty of Arts and Humanities, University of Macau, Taipa, Macau, China, corresponding author)
Year2021
Volume102
Issue6
Pages671-689
Publication date2021-07-29
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueEnglish Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0013-838X • E-ISSN: 1744-4217
PublisherRoutledge (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/0013838x.2021.1952529
OpenAlexW3190342731
LanguageEN
References cited29

A crucial and under-examined aspect of “The Walrus and the Carpenter” in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass (1871) is the relationship between euphemism and atrocity in the dealings with the anthropomorphised entities that are – or are in danger of becoming – food. Based on a close reading of the poem, this article explores how aesthetics and ethics work in considerations of form and courtesy, which impact the lives of such anthropomorphised entities. Situated at the intersections of anthropomorphism studies, animal ethics, and Carrollian scholarship, it is argued that nonsense, heightened by anthropomorphism, is a powerful means of aestheticizing contradictions. Regarding food anthropomorphism as both rhetorically and ethically invested reveals the contradictions between aesthetic forms of society and the grisly truth of human intraspecies relationships and human-animal relationships from the imperialist context to the contemporary situations of meat eating

Aesthetics · Context (archaeology · Courtesy · Environmental ethics · Linguistics · Political science · Scholarship · Situated · Sociology · Culinary Culture and Tourism · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Gothic Literature and Media Analysis · History · Law · Philosophy

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