The Whip and the Snarl

A chapter in a recent book and a review:

Animals in Victorian Literature and Culture
Contexts for Criticism
Editors: Mazzeno, Laurence W., Morrison, Ronald D. (Eds.)
Palgrave MacMillan
ISBN 978-1-137-60219-0

This collection includes twelve provocative essays from a diverse group of international scholars, who utilize a range of interdisciplinary approaches to analyze “real” and “representational” animals that stand out as culturally significant to Victorian literature and culture. Essays focus on a wide range of canonical and non-canonical Victorian writers, including Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, Anna Sewell, Emily Brontë, James Thomson, Christina Rossetti, and Richard Marsh, and they focus on a diverse array of forms: fiction, poetry, journalism, and letters. These essays consider a wide range of cultural attitudes and literary treatments of animals in the Victorian Age, including the development of the animal protection movement, the importation of animals from the expanding Empire, the acclimatization of British animals in other countries, and the problems associated with increasing pet ownership.  The collection also includes an Introduction co-written by the editors and Suggestions for Further Study, and will prove of interest to scholars and students across the multiple disciplines which comprise Animal Studies. 

Includes:

Cathy’s Whip and Heathcliff’s Snarl: Control, Violence, Care, and Rights in Wuthering Heights by
Susan Mary Pyke

This chapter explores strategies Emily Brontë employs to encourage a better treatment of all animals, human and nonhuman alike. Wuthering Heights most often depicts nonhuman animals as individuals, with their own subjectivities. Brontë’s depiction of nonhuman animals as subjects has particular ramifications when considered in terms of rights violations: in the novel, characters who exert violence against nonhumans inevitably mete out cruelty to humans. Brontë’s effort to write against both behaviors provides a striking example of the shifting position of nonhuman animals in the Victorian age. The shock readers experience at the violence in this novel allows it to be read as sympathetic to current-day ethical movements that consider the benefits of increasing the relational rights of nonhumans.

And a review of a recent Brontë-related book:

The Brontë Sisters in Other Wor(l)ds ed. by Shouhua Qi and Jacqueline Padgett (review)by Chen Wang
Comparative Literature Studies. Volume 53, Number 4, 2016 pp. 801-804</>

The contemporary relevance of nineteenth-century literary works such as those of the Brontë sisters lies not only in literary criticism and commentaries but also in their transformations in what is now a translingual, transnational, and transcultural setting. In other words, one form of restoring the value of the Brontë sisters in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries is through translations, namely, their “afterlives” in Walter Benjamin’s terms. The Brontë Sisters in Other Wor(l)ds, a remarkable collection of essays edited by Shouhua Qi and Jacqueline Padgett, brings to its readers different perspectives on the translations of the Brontë sisters particularly in the context of postcolonialism.