“I knew a dog once—”: Laura Richards’s Literary Animals and the Poetics of Animacy
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 anthropomorphis...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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European Association for American Studies
2024-12-01
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| Series: | European Journal of American Studies |
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| Online Access: | https://journals.openedition.org/ejas/22859 |
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| Summary: | 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. |
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| ISSN: | 1991-9336 |