Genre, tradition and renewal: Animal autobiography and poetics of the multicentric self

Chengcheng You ()
Additional contact information
Chengcheng You: University of Macau

Palgrave Communications, 2023, vol. 10, issue 1, 1-8

Abstract: Abstract The development of animal autobiography as a genre has been constrained by the narrative possibility and epistemological impossibility of animals as autobiographers. In spite of its limitations, animal autobiography has still developed into different generic forms. Noting the generic tradition and renewal as well as the ethical ramifications in animal autobiography, this study examines how animal selfhood is constructed to render varieties of autobiographical experiences. Drawn upon autofiction/autobiography studies and literary animal studies, this article probes into the art of self-invention in animal autobiography. A “self”-oriented analysis of Dorothy Kilner’s The Life and Perambulations of A Mouse (1784) and Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty (1877) reveals the genre’s common representational strategies, such as multi-scaled perceptions of an autofictional self, critical anthropomorphism and an ethics of witness. Based on these strategies, it further examines how Katherine Applegate’s The One and Only Ivan (2012) endorses a generic continuum and renewal. Following Jacques Derrida’s key concepts in his lecture “The Animal that Therefore I Am” in the discourse of human–animal relations, this study concludes with a proposed poetics of the multicentric self in animal autobiography, which maps out the interplay of the first-person persona’s authenticity, autofiction and literary authority, and serves the genre’s increasingly prominent anti-anthropocentric purposes.

Date: 2023
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1057/s41599-023-01827-3 Abstract (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pal:palcom:v:10:y:2023:i:1:d:10.1057_s41599-023-01827-3

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/palcomms/about

DOI: 10.1057/s41599-023-01827-3

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Palgrave Communications from Palgrave Macmillan
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().