Animal rights; PETA; the zoo; GMOs; factory farming; fancy dog breeding; Darwinism; dinomania-many of the ideas, social practices, and cultural formations that define and complicate our relationships with animals today can be traced back to a not-so-distant origin point: Victorian England. In this course, we will explore how Victorian literature observed, reflected, and perhaps even played a role in these developments. We will begin with Darwin's On the Origin of Species, which profoundly destabilized not only the categories Victorians used to define animals (and indeed, themselves), but also the literary forms that could be used to represent them. We will then read several texts from the period that contemplate the divisions and interrelationships between man and beast in a world where, for the first time, the two are understood to be not so distinct. After evolution, we will think about companionship: how the dog poems of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Michael Field dramatize the agonies and the ecstasies of 19th century petkeeping. Through Black Beauty (1877), we will think about empathy: how the novel, a product of the Victorian anti-cruelty movement, tackles the project of getting its readers to see the world through the eyes of a suffering workhorse. Through Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book (1894) and Arthur Conan Doyle's dinosaur novel The Lost World (1912)-as well as a trip to the Museum of Natural History, a treasure trove of latter-day Victorianism-we will think about animals both colonial and prehistoric: how exotic creatures from across the globe or across deep time functioned, over the second half of the 19th century, as screens for the projection of cultural anxieties. And through H.G. Wells's The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), we will think about monstrosity: post-Darwinian fantasies of human devolution, of animal experimentation gone awry. This course has no prerequisites, and will fulfill two of the English major's geographic (British) and generic (prose narrative) distribution requirements.

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