Animals and Humans in German Literature, 1800-2000 : Exploring the Great Divide

The recent emergence of the discipline of literary animal studies regards literature in itself as constitutive element of a history of knowledge.

The discipline has led not only to the expansion of the corpus of texts traditionally connected with animals, but also established new concepts and methods for revising conventional cultural dichotomies (subject and object, human and animal).

The 10 essays collected in this volume are devoted to a wide range of case studies on the relationship between animality and poetics in German-language literature since the 19th century.

They display a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches to a number of texts packed with references to animals, considered not primarily as objects of literature, but as agents endowed with an active role in the production of literature, and which have left repressed or forgotten traces in texts.