“Almost as a Person Would”: The Thinking Animal in Margaret Marshall Saunders's Beautiful Joe (1893)
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: Margaret Marshall Saunders's best-selling novel Beautiful Joe (1893) has long been indexed as anthropomorphic children's literature. This article examines the novel to illuminate the connection between nineteenth-century literature and animal-focused research, including studies of the science of the mind. My analysis seeks to coalesce what I see as neighboring discourses, both historical and contemporary, in literature and science about what it means to be a thinking, feeling “self.” In doing so, I reveal how Saunders's novel maps out the stakes of this impasse as consequential to literary criticism and the wider culture through its subject matter's entanglement with questions of consciousness, anthropomorphism, and representation.
Source: Victorian Literature and Culture
Author: Lauren Ianthe Cullen
Institution: University of Oxford
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $3,550
OpenAlex ID: W4409410339