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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN ANIMALS AND LITERATURE

The Palgrave Handbook

of Animals and Literature
Edited by
Susan McHugh · Robert McKay · John Miller
Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature

Series Editors
Susan McHugh
Department of English
University of New England
Auburn, ME, USA

Robert McKay
School of English
University of Sheffield
Sheffield, UK

John Miller
School of English
University of Sheffield
Sheffield, UK
Various academic disciplines can now be found in the process of executing an
‘animal turn’, questioning the ethical and philosophical grounds of human
exceptionalism by taking seriously the nonhuman animal presences that haunt
the margins of history, anthropology, philosophy, sociology and literary stud-
ies. Such work is characterised by a series of broad, cross-disciplinary questions.
How might we rethink and problematise the separation of the human from
other animals? What are the ethical and political stakes of our relationships with
other species? How might we locate and understand the agency of animals in
human cultures?
This series publishes work that looks, specifically, at the implications of the
‘animal turn’ for the field of English Studies. Language is often thought of as
the key marker of humanity’s difference from other species; animals may have
codes, calls or songs, but humans have a mode of communication of a wholly
other order. The primary motivation is to muddy this assumption and to ani-
malise the canons of English Literature by rethinking representations of ani-
mals and interspecies encounter. Whereas animals are conventionally read as
objects of fable, allegory or metaphor (and as signs of specifically human con-
cerns), this series significantly extends the new insights of interdisciplinary ani-
mal studies by tracing the engagement of such figuration with the material lives
of animals. It examines textual cultures as variously embodying a debt to or an
intimacy with animals and advances understanding of how the aesthetic engage-
ments of literary arts have always done more than simply illustrate natural his-
tory. We publish studies of the representation of animals in literary texts from
the Middle Ages to the present and with reference to the discipline’s key the-
matic concerns, genres and critical methods. The series focuses on literary
prose and poetry, while also accommodating related discussion of the full range
of materials and texts and contexts (from theatre and film to fine art, journal-
ism, the law, popular writing and other cultural ephemera) with which English
studies now engages.

Series Board
Karl Steel (Brooklyn College)
Erica Fudge (Strathclyde)
Kevin Hutchings (UNBC)
Philip Armstrong (Canterbury)
Carrie Rohman (Lafayette)
Wendy Woodward (Western Cape)

More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14649
 Susan McHugh
Robert McKay • John Miller
Editors

The Palgrave
Handbook of Animals
and Literature
Editors
Susan McHugh Robert McKay
Department of English School of English
University of New England University of Sheffield
Auburn, ME, USA Sheffield, UK
John Miller
School of English
University of Sheffield
Sheffield, UK

ISSN 2634-6338        ISSN 2634-6346 (electronic)

Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature
ISBN 978-3-030-39772-2    ISBN 978-3-030-39773-9 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39773-9

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature
Switzerland AG 2021
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher,
whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation,
­reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any
other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation,
computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt
from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this
book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the
authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material c­ ontained
herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with
regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Cover illustration: © Gina Kelly / Alamy Stock Photo, Image ID: R2PJDP. Date taken: 19
November 2018

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG.
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
 Acknowledgements

Susan McHugh would like to thank Marion Copeland for providing long-time
support and encouragement to study animals as animals in literature. All stu-
dents studying animal-themed texts in her courses deserve credit as well for
inspiration, especially Halie Pruitt in the Animal Humanities seminar. My work
also is made possible by my beloved family, friends, and many supportive col-
leagues at the University of New England and elsewhere. Here it is dedicated
to memories of learning how to study animal behaviour from Teresa
Dzieweczynski, fearless and peerless leader of Team Fighting Fish.
Robert McKay would like to thank Lily Buntain, for the classes on Animal
Farm that started it all. Thanks also go to the University of Sheffield for sup-
porting this project, and particularly to friends and students in the School of
English who make working life enjoyable. I especially thank everyone involved
in the Sheffield Animal Studies Research Centre over the past years. I thank
Sonny and Oscar, who fill my days with joy, and as ever, my deepest thanks, for
this and everything else, go to Gayle.
John Miller would like to thank successive generations of students on
LIT6045: Humans, Animals, Monsters and Machines at the University of
Sheffield. Every group has challenged me in different ways and taught me a
huge amount about how we imagine the lives of other creatures. The seed for
my contribution to the volume was planted by the late Anthony Carrigan, an
inspiring thinker and writer.
The editors would like to thank the contributors, and each other.

v
 Contents


Introduction: Towards an Animal-Centred Literary History  1
Susan McHugh, Robert McKay, and John Miller

Part I Theoretical Underpinnings  13


The Exception and the Norm: Dimensions of Anthropocentrism 15
Tom Tyler


Metaphor, Metonymy, More-Than-­Anthropocentric. The Animal
That Therefore I Read (and Follow) 37
Ann-Sofie Lönngren


Narratology Beyond the Human: Self-Narratives and Inter-Species
Identities 51
David Herman


An(im)alogical Thinking: Contemporary Black Literature and the
Dreaded Comparison 65
Diana Leong

 Are Not in This World Alone: On Drawing Close, Animal

We
Stories, and a Multispecies Sense of Place 79
Nandini Thiyagarajan

vii
viii Contents

Part II Medieval Literature  95

 Community of Exiles: Whale and Human Domains in Old

A
English Poetry 97
Megan Cavell

 Ontological Turn for the Medieval Books of Beasts:

An
Environmental Theory from Premodern to Postmodern111
Susan Crane


Chaucer, Lydgate, and the Half-Heard Nightingale127
Carolynn Van Dyke


Huntings of the Hare: The Medieval and Early Modern Poetry of
Imperiled Animals141
Karl Steel

Part III Early Modern Literature 153


Human, Animal, and Metamorphic Becomings155
Carla Freccero


Sheep, Beasts, and Knights: Fugitive Alterity in Edmund Spenser’s
The Faerie Queene Book VI, and The Shepheardes Calender167
Rachel Stenner


My Palfrey, Myself: Toward a Queer Phenomenology of the
Horse-Human Bond in Henry V and Beyond181
Karen Raber


What Can Beast Fables Do in Literary Animal Studies? Ben
Jonson’s Volpone and the Prehumanist Human195
Erica Fudge

Part IV Literature of the Eighteenth Century 209


“Real” Animals and the Eighteenth-Century Literary Imagination211
Laura Brown
 Contents  ix


Mary Leapor’s Creatureliness in “An Essay on Woman” and Other
Poems225
Anne Milne


Poetics of the Hunt: Re-reading Agency and Re-thinking Ecology
in William Somerville’s The Chase239
Richard Nash

Part V Romantic Literature 251


Beyond Symbolism: The Rights and Biopolitics of Romantic
Period Animals253
Ron Broglio


Bad Dog: The Dark Side of Misbehaving Animals265
Chase Pielak


Why Animals Matter in Jane Austen277
Barbara K. Seeber


John Keats and the Sound of Autumn: Reading Poetry in a Time
of Extinction291
Michael Malay


Cooper’s Animal Offences: The Confusion of Species in Last of the
Mohicans307
Onno Oerlemans

Part VI Victorian Literature 319


Jane Eyre and Tess Durbeyfield at the Human/Animal Border321
Ivan Kreilkamp


Animals and Nonsense: Edward Lear’s Menagerie333
Ann C. Colley


Intimacy, Objectification, and Inter/Intra-­Species Relations in
Victorian Animal Autobiographies347
Monica Flegel
x Contents

How Not to Eat: Vegetarian Polemics in Victorian India361

Parama Roy

Part VII Modernist Literature 383


Modernist Animals and Bioaesthetics385
Carrie Rohman


Vivisection in Modernist Culture and Popular Fiction, 1890–1945397
Katherine Ebury


Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein: Two Modernist Women
Writing as Dogs411
Marianne DeKoven

Kingship, Kinship and the King of Beasts in Early Southern

African Novels423
Jade Munslow Ong


Animals Inside: Creatureliness in Dezső Kosztolányi’s Skylark and
Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life437
Anat Pick

Part VIII Contemporary Literature 457


Speculative Humanisms: Postwar Universalism and the Question
of the Animal459
Seán McCorry


CanLit’s Ossiferous Fictions: Animal Bones and Fossils in Margaret
Atwood’s Life Before Man and Carol Shields’s The Stone Diaries473
Sarah Bezan


Returning to the Animals’ Gaze: Reflective Readings of Lionesses
Marah and Sekhmet487
Wendy Woodward
 Contents  xi


“Without the Right Words It’s Hard to Retain Clarity”:
Speculative Fiction and Animal Narrative499
Sherryl Vint


Jesmyn Ward’s Dog Bite: Mississippi Love and Death Stories513
Bénédicte Boisseron


Shared and Hefted Lives in Twenty-First-­Century Shepherds’
Calendars525
Catherine Parry

Part IX New Directions 539


The Biopolitics of Animal Love: Two Settler Stories541
Nicole Shukin


Companion Prosthetics: Avatars of Animality and Disability557
Michael Lundblad and Jan Grue


Denizen Habitations: Spaces of Solidarity in Recent South Asian
Fiction575
Sundhya Walther


Plagues, Poisons, and Dead Rats: A Multispecies History589
Lucinda Cole

Last Chance to See: Extinction in Literary Animal Studies and the

Environmental Humanities605
John Miller

Index621
 Notes on Contributors

Sarah Bezan is a Newton International Fellow at the University of Sheffield

Animal Studies Research Centre (ShARC), where she researches visual and
verbal narratives of evolution and extinction. She has contributed articles to
Mosaic, the Journal for Critical Animal Studies, and Antennae: the Journal of
Nature in Visual Culture, among others. With Susan McHugh, she co-­edited
a special issue on “Taxidermic Forms and Fictions” that recently appeared in
Configurations: the Journal of Literature, Science, and Technology. She is at work
on a book project on species loss and revival in a biotechnological age.
Bénédicte Boisseron specializes in the fields of black diaspora studies, franco-
phone studies, and animal studies. She is the author of Creole Renegades: Rhetoric
of Betrayal and Guilt in the Caribbean Diaspora (2014), 2015 winner of the
Nicolás Guillén Outstanding Book Award from the Caribbean Philosophical
Association. Her most recent book, Afro-Dog: Blackness and the Animal Question
(2018), draws on recent debates about black life and animal rights to investigate
the relationship between race and the animal in the history and culture of the
Americas and the black Atlantic.
Ron Broglio is a professor in the Department of English at Arizona State
University and a senior scholar at the university’s Global Institute of Sustainability
as well as a visiting research fellow at the University of Cumbria and President of
the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts. He is the author of Beasts of
Burden: Biopolitics, Labor, and Animal Life and Surface Encounters: Thinking
with Animals and Art and Technologies of the Picturesque among other books and
edited collections. Broglio is creating artwork on desert attunement and writing
an artistic and theoretical treatise called Animal Revolution: Events to Come.
Laura Brown is the John Wendell Anderson Professor at Cornell University.
Her recent books—Homeless Dogs and Melancholy Apes and Fables of Modernity—
focus on apes, monkeys, and lapdogs and on literature and culture—from the
sewer and the stock market to the public appearances of African “princes.”

xiii
xiv NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Megan Cavell researches and teaches a wide range of topics in medieval stud-
ies at the University of Birmingham: from Old and early Middle English and
Latin languages and literature to gender, material culture, and animal studies.
Her first monograph, Weaving Words and Binding Bodies: The Poetics of
Human Experience in Old English Literature, was published by the University
of Toronto Press in 2016, and she is working on a second project about
medieval predators. She is also the editor-in-chief of The Riddle Ages
(www.theriddleages.wordpress.com), producing open-access translations
and commentaries for the Old English riddles of the Exeter Book.
Lucinda Cole is a research associate professor at the University of Illinois,
Urbana-Champaign. She writes about animals, disease, ecology, and literature.
Her 2016 book Imperfect Creatures: Vermin, Literatures, and the Sciences of Life
1600–1740 was winner of the Robert Lowry Patten Award 2017 (Studies in
English Literature 1500–1900) for the most outstanding recent book in
Restoration and eighteenth-century English literature. With Robert Markley, she
is co-editor of AnthropoScene, a book series published by Penn State University Press.
Ann C. Colley is a State University of New York (SUNY) at Buffalo distin-
guished professor, emerita, and a visiting fellow of Wolfson College, the
University of Cambridge. She has published books on nineteenth-century lit-
erature and culture with Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Macmillan Press, the
University of Georgia Press, Palgrave, Ashgate, and Manchester University
Press. Her most recent work, Wild Animal Skins in Victorian Britain, was
favorably reviewed in the 6 November 2015 issue of The Times Literary
Supplement (TLS) and, in August 2018, so too was her memoir, The Odyssey and
Dr. Novak. In addition, chapters and articles have appeared in anthologies and
journals, such as The Kenyon Review, Genre, English Language Studies, Victorian
Literature and Culture, New World Writing, and The Centennial Review.
Susan Crane is Parr Professor Emerita of English and Comparative Literature
at Columbia University. Her research in animal studies includes Animal
Encounters, on cross-species interactions in medieval Britain; a chapter on
medieval totemism in The Performance of Self; and an essay in progress,
“Francis of Assisi on Eating and Worshipping with Animals.”
Marianne DeKoven is Distinguished Professor Emerita of English at Rutgers
University, where she won university-wide awards for both Teaching Excellence
and Research Excellence. She is the author of Utopia Limited: The Sixties and
the Emergence of the Postmodern (2004, winner of the Narrative Society’s
Perkins Prize for Best Book on Prose Fiction), Rich and Strange: Gender
History, Modernism (1991, Choice Award), and A Different Language:
Gertrude Stein’s Experimental Writing (1983). She is also the editor of the
Norton Critical Edition of Gertrude Stein’s Three Lives (2006), of Feminist
Locations: Global and Local, Theory and Practice (2001), and co-editor of
Species Matters: Humane Advocacy and Cultural Theory (2011). She is working
on a book project involving modernist and contemporary literary animals.
 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xv

Katherine Ebury is Senior Lecturer in Modern Literature at the University of

Sheffield. Her research interests include life-writing, modernism, psychoanaly-
sis, literature and science, animal studies, and law and literature. Her first
monograph, Modernism and Cosmology, appeared in 2014, and she is the co-
editor (with Dr James Alexander Fraser) of Joyce’s Non-Fiction Writings:
Outside His Jurisdiction, which appeared with Palgrave in 2018. Her articles
have appeared in journals such as Irish Studies Review, Joyce Studies Annual,
Journal of Modern Literature, and Society and Animals. She has an Arts and
Humanities Research Council-funded project on the death penalty, literature,
and psychoanalysis from 1900 to 1950.
Monica Flegel is Associate Professor of English at Lakehead University. Her
research is in cultural studies, particularly child studies and animal studies in the
Victorian period. She specializes in analyzing representations of intimacy
and familial relations and on the overlapping representations of children
and pets. She is the author of Conceptualizing Cruelty in Nineteenth-Century
England (2009) and Pets and Domesticity in Victorian Literature and Culture
(2012) and co-editor of Cruel Children in Popular Texts and Culture (2018).
Carla Freccero is Distinguished Professor of Literature and History of
Consciousness, Chair of Literature, and Graduate Director in History of
Consciousness at UC Santa Cruz, where she has taught since 1991. In addition
to numerous essays on early modernity, queer and feminist theory and criti-
cism, and animal theory, she is the author of Father Figures: Genealogy and
Narrative Structure in Rabelais (1991), Popular Culture: An Introduction
(1999), and Queer/Early/Modern (2006). She has co-edited Premodern
Sexualities (1996), with Louise Fradenburg; a Special Issue of American
Quarterly 65.3 (2013) on Species/Race/Sex with Claire Jean Kim; and a
Special Issue of Yale French Studies 127 (2015), Animots, with Matthew
Senior and David L. Clark. Her current project is titled Animal Inscription.
Erica Fudge is Professor of English Studies at the University of Strathclyde,
Glasgow, and is the Director of the British Animal Studies Network. She has
written widely on human–animal relations in the early modern period, and her
most recent book is Quick Cattle and Dying Wishes: People and Their Animals
in Early Modern England (2018). She has an essay in the forthcoming Routledge
Companion to Shakespeare and Animals (ed. Holly Dugan and Karen Raber).
Jan Grue is Professor of Qualitative Methods at the Department of Special
Needs Education, the University of Oslo. Among his research interests are dis-
ability, discourse analysis, rhetoric, embodiment, and normality. He is the
author, most recently, of Disability and Discourse Analysis (2015) and a
Norwegian-language book on posthumanism (2019).
David Herman’s is an independent scholar whose recent contributions to
human–animal studies include a guest-edited special issue of Modern Fiction
Studies on “Animal Worlds in Modern Fiction” (2014); two edited volumes,
xvi NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Creatural Fictions (2016) and Animal Comics (2018); and a monograph on

Narratology Beyond the Human: Storytelling and Animal Life (2018). His
translation of Klaus Modick’s Moos (Moss) is forthcoming.
Ivan Kreilkamp teaches in the Department of English at Indiana University,
where he also directs the Victorian Studies Program and is co-editor of
Victorian Studies. He is the author, most recently, of Minor Creatures: Persons,
Animals, and the Victorian Novel (2018).
Diana Leong is Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature at
San Diego State University. Her research interests include environmental jus-
tice, Black literature and culture, and the environmental humanities. She is
completing a monograph, Against Wind and Tide: Toward a Slave Ship
Ecology, that theorizes the slave ship as a site for the material and imagina-
tive convergence of environmental justice and abolitionism. Her work has
also appeared in ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment,
Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, and Electronic Book Review.
Ann-Sofie Lönngren is Associate Professor in Literature and a lecturer at
Södertörn University College in Stockholm, Sweden. She has published exten-
sively on the subjects of the Nordic literary canon, queer studies, and animal
studies. Her most recent volume is Following the Animal. Power, Agency, and
Human–Animal Transformations in Modern, Northern-European Literature.
Michael Lundblad is Professor of English-Language Literature at the
University of Oslo, Norway. He is the author of The Birth of a Jungle: Animality
in Progressive-Era U.S. Literature and Culture (2013); the co-editor, with
Marianne DeKoven, of Species Matters: Humane Advocacy and Cultural Theory
(2012); and the editor of Animalities: Literary and Cultural Studies Beyond the
Human (2017). He is also the Primary Investigator of a research project funded
by the Research Council of Norway on “The Biopolitics of Disability, Illness,
and Animality: Cultural Representations and Societal Significance.”
Michael Malay is Lecturer in English Literature and Environmental
Humanities at the University of Bristol, UK. He has published articles on
Elizabeth Bishop, Ted Hughes, Raymond Williams, and is the author of The
Figure of the Animal in Modern and Contemporary Poetry (2018).
Seán McCorry is an honorary research fellow at the University of Sheffield.
He is undertaking two major research projects: the first of these examines
human–animal relations in mid-twentieth-century culture and the second inves-
tigates the aesthetics and politics of meat eating in contemporary culture. His
articles have appeared in Extrapolation and ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in
Literature and Environment.
Susan McHugh is Professor of English at the University of New England,
USA. She is the author of Dog (2004, 2019), Animal Stories: Narrating across
Species Lines (2011), and Love in a Time of Slaughters: Human–Animal Stories
 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xvii

Against Genocide and Extinction (2019). Her co-edited books include: The
Routledge Handbook of Human–Animal Studies (2014), with Garry Marvin;
Indigenous Creatures, Native Knowledges, and the Arts: Human–Animal
Studies in Modern Worlds (2017), with Wendy Woodward; and Posthumanism
in Art and Science: A Reader (2020), with Giovanni Aloi. She is series co-
editor of Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature and Humanities Managing
Editor for Society and Animals. She is currently working on a monograph on
plants and literature.
Robert McKay is Professor of Contemporary Literature at the University of
Sheffield, where he is co-director of the Sheffield Animal Studies Research
Centre. His research focuses on the politics of species in modern and contem-
porary literature and film. He is the co-editor of Against Value in the Arts and
Education (2016) and Werewolves, Wolves and the Gothic (2017), series co-­
editor of Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature, and Associate Editor
(Literature) for Society and Animals. He is working on two projects: a mono-
graph on the politics of species in late twentieth-century fiction and a study of
the place of animal ethics in American culture, politics, and law in the middle
of the twentieth century.
John Miller is Senior Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Literature at the
University of Sheffield. His books include Empire and the Animal Body (2012)
and (with Louise Miller) Walrus (2014). He is co-editor of Palgrave Studies in
Animals and Literature, co-director of ShARC (Sheffield Animal Studies
Research Centre), and President of ASLE-UKI (Association for Study of
Literature and the Environment, UK & Ireland). He is completing a mono-
graph titled Victorians in Furs: Fiction, Fashion and Activism and beginning
work on A Literary History of In Vitro Meat.
Anne Milne is a lecturer at the University of Toronto Scarborough. She was
a Carson Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in
Munich (2011) and published “Lactilla Tends Her Fav’rite Cow”: Ecocritical
Readings of Animals and Women in Eighteenth-Century British Labouring-­
Class Women’s Poetry in 2008. Her recent publications highlight bioregional-
ism and animals in eighteenth-century studies.
Jade Munslow Ong is Lecturer in English Literature at the University of
Salford, UK. She is the author of Olive Schreiner and African Modernism:
Allegory, Empire and Postcolonial Writing (2018) and articles in the Journal of
Postcolonial Writing and Journal of Commonwealth Literature. She is working
on a book with Matthew Whittle, titled Global Literatures and the Environment:
Twenty-First Century Perspectives (forthcoming).
Richard Nash is Professor Emeritus of English at Indiana University. He is
the author of several books and numerous articles on eighteenth-century
English literature and culture and on animal studies. He now buys and sells
racehorses.
xviii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Onno Oerlemans is Professor of Literature at Hamilton College, where he

teaches courses on romanticism, environmentalism, animal studies, and the
literature of medicine. His most recent work is Poetry and Animals: Blurring
the Boundaries with the Human, published by Columbia University Press.
Catherine Parry lectures at the University of Lincoln, UK. She has com-
pleted a doctorate on animals in twenty-first-century fiction (2016) at the same
institution and published research on literature, animals and environment,
including a monograph with Palgrave titled Other Animals in Twenty-First
Century Fiction (2017).
Anat Pick is Reader in Film at Queen Mary, the University of London. She is
author of Creaturely Poetics: Animality and Vulnerability in Literature and
Film (2011) and co-editor of Screening Nature: Cinema Beyond the Human
(2013). She has published widely on the place of vulnerability and crea-
tureliness in animal ethics and is working on a book on the philosopher
and mystic Simone Weil and cinema.
Chase Pielak writes about animals in nineteenth-century literature and post-
human criticism. His first book, Memorializing Animals during the Romantic
Period, is available from Routledge.
Karen Raber is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of
Mississippi and Executive Director of the Shakespeare Association of America.
Her recent monographs include Shakespeare and Posthumanist Theory (2018)
and Animal Bodies, Renaissance Culture (2013); in addition to authoring
numerous articles and book chapters, she co-edited Performing Animals:
History, Agency, Theater (2017) with Monica Mattfeld, and The Culture of
the Horse: Status, Discipline and Identity in the Early Modern World (2005)
with Treva Tucker as well as serving as series editor of Routledge’s Perspectives
on the Non-Human in Literature and Culture. Among her current works in
progress are a handbook and a dictionary, both focused on Shakespeare’s ani-
mals, and a monograph that uses new materialist methods to investigate the
nature of meat in early modern culture.
Carrie Rohman is Professor of English at Lafayette College and works in
animal studies, modernism, posthumanism, and performance. She is the author
of Stalking the Subject: Modernism and the Animal (2009) and Choreographies
of the Living: Bioaesthetics in Literature, Art, and Performance (2018).
Parama Roy is Professor of English at the University of California, Davis. She
is the author of Indian Traffic: Identities in Question in Colonial and Postcolonial
India (1998) and Alimentary Tracts: Appetites, Aversions, and the Postcolonial
(2010) and co-editor of States of Trauma: Gender and Violence in South Asia
(2009). Her current book project is titled “Empire’s Nonhumans.”
Barbara K. Seeber is Professor of English at Brock University, Canada. She is
the author of General Consent in Jane Austen: A Study of Dialogism and Jane
Austen and Animals, as well as the co-author of The Slow Professor: Challenging
the Culture of Speed in the Academy.
 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xix

Nicole Shukin is an associate professor in the Department of English at the

University of Victoria, Canada. She is the author of Animal Capital: Rendering
Life in Biopolitical Times (2009) as well as articles on capitalist culturenatures
that study nonhuman animals’ relationship to technologies of cinema, pastoral
power, precarity and resilience, and radiation ecologies.
Karl Steel is Associate Professor of English at Brooklyn College and the
Graduate Center, CUNY. His work includes How to Make a Human: Animals
and Violence in the Middle Ages (2011) and How Not to Make a Human: Pets,
Feral Children, Worms, Sky Burial, Oysters (2019).
Rachel Stenner is Lecturer in English Literature 1350–1660 at the University
of Sussex, having previously taught at the Universities of Bristol and Sheffield.
Her research focuses on early modern print culture and, increasingly, animal
studies. Her monograph, The Typographic Imaginary in Early Modern English
Literature (2018), analyzes how the printing press is represented and the-
orized from 1470 to 1740. She recently co-edited Rereading Chaucer and
Spenser: Dan Geffrey with the New Poete (2019). Her current projects are a
study of regional print culture in the handpress period, and a monograph
on the Tudor satirist, William Baldwin.
Nandini Thiyagarajan is Faculty Fellow of Environmental and Animal
Studies at New York University. She works at the intersections between deco-
lonial studies, critical race studies, environmental humanities, and animal stud-
ies. Her current book project draws connections between migration, animals,
race, and climate change.
Tom Tyler is Lecturer in Digital Culture at the University of Leeds, UK. He
has published widely on animals and anthropocentrism within the history of
ideas, critical theory, and popular culture. He is the author of CIFERAE: A
Bestiary in Five Fingers (2012), co-editor of Animal Encounters (2009), and
editor of Animal Beings (Parallax #38, 12.1, 2006).
Carolynn Van Dyke Professor Emerita at Lafayette College, is editor of
Rethinking Chaucerian Beasts and author of the Fiction of Truth: Structures of
Meaning in Narrative and Dramatic Allegory and Chaucer’s Agents: Cause
and Representation in Chaucerian Narrative. She taught computer science
and women’s studies as well as literary studies.
Sherryl Vint is Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of
California, Riverside, where she directs the Speculative Fictions and Cultures of
Science program. She was a founding editor of Science Fiction Film and
Television and is an editor for Science Fiction Studies. She has written widely
on science fiction, including Animal Alterity (2010) and Science Fiction and
Culture Theory: A Reader (2015). She is working on The Promissory
Imagination, a book about speculative representation in an era of the com-
modification of biology and the biopolitical management of life.
xx NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Sundhya Walther is Presidential Academic Fellow in World Literatures in

English at the University of Manchester. Her manuscript in progress focuses on
multispecies living in contemporary South Asian fiction. Her work on animals
in postcolonial literature has been published in Modern Fiction Studies,
University of Toronto Quarterly, and Journal for Critical Animal Studies.
Wendy Woodward is Professor Emerita in English Literature at the University
of the Western Cape, South Africa. She is the author of The Animal Gaze:
Animal Subjectivities in Southern African Narratives (2008) and the co-editor,
with Erika Lemmer, of a Special Issue of Journal of Literary Studies on Figuring
the Animal in Post-apartheid South Africa (2014). She is also co-editor, with
Susan McHugh, of Indigenous Creatures, Native Knowledges and the Arts:
Animal Studies in Modern Worlds (2017). She has also published three vol-
umes of poetry.
 List of Figures

The Exception and the Norm: Dimensions of Anthropocentrism

Fig. 1 Leonardo da Vinci’s “Vitruvian Man” (c. 1490); pen and ink with
wash over metalpoint on paper, 34.4 cm × 25.5 cm,
Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice 16
Fig. 2 “The Great Chain of Being” (1579); woodcut from Diego Valadés,
Rhetorica Christiana, plate following p. 221 19
Fig. 3 Haeckel’s “Pedigree of Man” (1874) in Evolution of Man,
vol. 2, plate XV 21

 Ontological Turn for the Medieval Books of Beasts:

An
Environmental Theory from Premodern to Postmodern
Fig. 1 “Lion with Ape, Men, and Rooster”. The Bodleian Library, University
of Oxford, MS Bodley 764, folio 2. By permission of the Bodleian
Library, University of Oxford 113
Fig. 2 Swan entry with source texts. The Bodleian Library, University of
Oxford, MS Bodley 764, folios 65v–66. By permission of the Bodleian
Library, University of Oxford 117
Fig. 3 Lion entry with source texts. The Bodleian Library, University of
Oxford, MS Bodley 764, folios 3–4v. By permission of the Bodleian
Library, University of Oxford 120


Huntings of the Hare: The Medieval and Early Modern Poetry
of Imperiled Animals
Fig. 1 Robert Henryson’s “Preaching of the Swallow”, (c) The British
Library Board, Harley MS 3865, 43v, after 1571 146


John Keats and the Sound of Autumn: Reading Poetry in a Time
of Extinction
Fig. 1 “Two Butterflies went out at Noon”, Emily Dickinson 295
Fig. 2 “On the Grasshopper and Cricket”, John Keats 296

xxi
xxii List of Figures

Animals and Nonsense: Edward Lear’s Menagerie

Fig. 1 Edward Lear. “There was an old person of Crowle” 334
Fig. 2 Edward Lear. “There was an old man of Dumblane” 339
Fig. 3 Edward Lear. “There was an old man in a Marsh” 341
Fig. 4 Edward Lear. “There was an old man of Dunrose” 342
Fig. 5 Edward Lear. “The Story of the Four Little Children Who Went
Round the World” 343
Fig. 6 Edward Lear. “The History of the Seven Families of the Lake Pipple-
Popple”344

Companion Prosthetics: Avatars of Animality and Disability

Fig. 1 Negative constructions of prosthetic hierarchies 559
Fig. 2 Simplistic constructions of prosthetic agency 560
Fig. 3 Dynamic animacies of companion species 564
Fig. 4 Responding to prosthetic others 569

Plagues, Poisons, and Dead Rats: A Multispecies History

Fig. 1 1913 Advert for the Liverpool Virus. (Courtesy of The Skittish Library) 590
Fig. 2 From Public Health Reports April 17, 1914. https://www.jstor.org/
stable/4570698. (Courtesy of Jstor) 596
 Introduction: Towards an Animal-Centred
Literary History

Susan McHugh, Robert McKay, and John Miller

Slippery or hard to catch, difficult to pin down, to be flushed out into the
open, a moving target. Metaphors abound for describing the elusiveness of
literary meaning, metaphors that equate it to an animal to be pursued (such as,
here, a fish, butterfly, fox, or grouse). The implication is that interpretation
itself is some seemingly proper violence to be done. And yet, other more gener-
ous, friendly kinds of encounter of reader and animal in the field of literature
are possible. This handbook is a record of such encounters, and so we hope it
will bring yet more into the world.
To introduce them, let’s start by opening a well-known and important
novel, finding the animals in it, and making sense of the encounters with ani-
mality it makes possible. The beginning of Virginia Woolf’s classic work of lit-
erary modernism, To the Lighthouse, is itself a good example of literary meaning’s
evasions, its disturbance of the human, and its proximity to animality.

“Yes of course, if it’s fine tomorrow”, said Mrs Ramsay. “But you’ll have to be up
with the lark”, she added.1

S. McHugh
Department of English, University of New England, Biddeford, ME, USA
e-mail: [email protected]
R. McKay (*) • J. Miller
School of English, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK
e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2021 1

S. McHugh et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Animals
and Literature, Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39773-9_1
2 S. MCHUGH ET AL.

These sentences place and then promptly displace a human reader. For the
“you” they speak to is not the “me” that is reading, pulled into the story by the
direct mode of address; instead “I” am changed to become Mrs Ramsay’s tan-
talised son James, a six year old boy who fervently hopes to make the epony-
mous visit to the lighthouse. As the novel proceeds, this visit, and the lighthouse
itself, become heavily overdetermined symbols of humans’ striving for meaning
and for understanding, of their perpetual need for that striving, and for the
attempt to establish through it some kind of new order; it therefore matters
greatly how these symbols are introduced. Mrs Ramsay is first reassuringly affir-
mative about the trip, but then immediately conditional: To the Lighthouse is set
on Skye, an island to the north west of the Scottish mainland, where the pros-
pect of good weather is certainly not to be guaranteed. Human projects, we are
given to understand, are necessarily subject to climatic conditions—a strong
enough reminder of their cosmic insignificance. But Mrs Ramsay is at last even
more determinate and commanding: only by following the ways of the birds,
by participating in the animal world, is there hope that such plans will come to
pass. As the opening of a novel, this moment is a perfect instance of literature’s
ability to undermine self-certainty, and its demand for a suspension, an evasion
or a projection of the reading self. In literature, it says, “we” are not “our-
selves”, our fully and separately human selves. And such a self-suspension
demands of us, Woolf suggests, that we place ourselves at one with the animal.
Perhaps, you are thinking, such a reading is strictly for the birds—an idiom
meaning unimportant or worthless (after the seeds and sprouts that sometimes
appear in horse manure); after all, isn’t “up with the lark” simply a dead meta-
phor, a turn of phrase meaning to get up very early: something every traveller
knows well enough? But if so, that makes it all the more fitting as a way to
approach to the central topic of this handbook, animals in literature. The critic
John Berger asserts that “it is not unreasonable to suppose that the first meta-
phor was animal”.2 It is a speculation whose reasoning, while strictly speaking
impossible to prove, sits well with the near omnipresence of animal imagery
across forms of visual, sonic or linguistic representation or creativity, from any-
where in the world at any point in time. Phrase and fable, religious iconogra-
phy, painting, heraldry, popular cartoon, animated film, music, advertising,
dance, digital media, drama, fiction, poetry. Certainly, the prevalence of the
animal-as-metaphor thesis ensures that animals present a particular problem to
reading or interpretation. This can be presented as an either/or dilemma. Do
we read this or that literary animal as a metaphorical figure: as a symbol, part
of a cross-species allegory in which animal life embodies ideas about human
life? Or should we, reading animals in literature, find ways to make sense of
them as animals, attentive to their portrayal as an account of their own material
or experiential reality? But this would be to oversimplify, and to miss the special
value of animals as literary presences. For, as the essays in this volume show,
there is great value in both of these interpretive positions, the metaphorical and
the material, in navigating between them, and attempting both at the same time.
 INTRODUCTION: TOWARDS AN ANIMAL-CENTRED LITERARY HISTORY 3

From the very beginnings of literary production—in this handbook we

travel as far back as the eighth century with some discussion of works from the
ancient world—animals and animality have offered writers a limitless resource
of expressive possibility. In creative, poetic hands, such imagery produces new
and insightful ways of understanding human life and the world around it.
Woolf is herself fond of such imagery and uses it throughout To the Lighthouse,
with almost everyone in the novel characterised in relation to animal life at
some point. Here are two examples which highlight how Woolf’s modernism,
an art of multiple perspectives showing that meaning is always shaped by the
form of perception, would be impossible without a metaphorics of the animal.
Mrs Ramsay’s husband is a philosopher whose aim is to comprehend the
nature of reality, a project he thinks of as like working progressively through
the alphabet; but he is past his prime, some way short of the genius he narcis-
sistically hopes for, and self-conscious of his mind’s waning acuity. The limits of
his intellectual capacity are represented in a memorable saurian simile. “A shut-
ter, like the leathern eyelid of a lizard, flickered over the intensity of his gaze
and obscured the letter R. In that flash of darkness he heard people saying—he
was a failure—that R was beyond him” (41). The poetic image here, strikingly
alliterative and assonant, couples an exotic animal (by the standards of an
English family holidaying in island Scotland, at least) with the mundane resil-
ient quality of tanned animal skin. The metaphor is somewhat overburdened,
though, drawing also on the way sight conventionally stands for intellectual
knowledge, and mixing this with a symbol of finality in the closing of a window
shutter. So the effect is striking, if somewhat strange, and this highlights by
contrast the hidebound stolidity of Ramsay’s intellect.
Conversely, the intimate reality of other people, and Mrs Ramsay’s deep
ability to perceive it through the “knowledge and wisdom [of the] heart”
(58–9), is imagined by Lily Briscoe (a young artist and guest of the Ramsays)
in quite different animal terms:

How then, she had asked herself, did one know one thing or another about
people, sealed as they were? Only like a bee, drawn by some sweetness or sharp-
ness in the air intangible to touch or taste, one haunted the dome-shaped hive,
ranged the wastes of the air over the countries of the world alone, and then
haunted the hives with their murmurs and their stirrings; the hives which were
people. (59)

For Martha Nussbaum, this passage shows Lily recognising that people cannot
fundamentally be known, that they “cannot be entered and possessed” because
they are “in fact, sealed hives”.3 But this is surely to downplay how Woolf
undermines the difference between human and bee by moving away from sim-
ile, to metaphor and then to an assertion of selfsameness; the effect is to natu-
ralise and so insist upon the intimate understanding that Mrs Ramsay achieves.
She is first “like a bee”, pathetically and romantically imagined in a solitary,
involuntary “haunting” of the “dome-shaped hive”, a clear enough figure for
4 S. MCHUGH ET AL.

a compulsion to experience other minds. But the sentence ends with a kind of
refusal of metaphor that is equally an assertion of cross-species existence: “the
hives that were people”. As bees quite naturally range individually but live col-
lectively in hives, Mrs Ramsay is herself alone but empathetically inhabits the
worlds of others. Woolf’s writing does not put the specifics of apian life to use
instrumentally, imaginatively drawing on them to describe a fundamentally dif-
ferent and more aesthetically important kind of life that is human. Rather, it
lays bare the force of the creaturely, a space which holds human life together
with nonhuman life. Many essays in this volume explore that space too.
We can sense in these examples something perhaps obvious but still needing
to be remarked about the presence of animal life in literature, and this is the
sheer experiential richness of animal bodies and animal worlds. This aspect of
literary animality is important not least because of the increasing vulnerability
of those bodies and worlds in this era of extinction. In their visual, sonic, olfac-
tory, physical and experiential heterogeneity animals inspire, and thus they can
be made to epitomise, any possible emotion: they surprise, excite, delight,
intrigue; they provoke trepidation or fear and anticipation, fun; disgust and
hunger; horror and compassion. Any such list will by necessity be incomplete;
but it is also one reason why animality has been such a part of the imaginative
force of mythological representations, to choose one especially prevalent site of
animal imagery. Woolf, too, knows this. James Ramsay’s oedipal animosity
towards his father, which he continues to experience in adolescence as impo-
tence to resist the force of a fierce murderous rage, is figured as a “sudden
black-winged harpy, with its talons and its beak all cold and hard, that struck
and struck at you (he could almost feel the beak on his bare leg, where it had
struck as a child) and then made off” (198). The creative significance of avian
animality in bodying forth psychic horror in lines like these reminds us that it
is almost impossible to imagine a literary gothic without the aura of black
feathers.
But beyond this—the meaningfulness of an animal otherness not encoun-
tered in actuality but profoundly experienced nonetheless—we need also to
recognise the force and meaningfulness in literature of the quotidian world of
human–animal encounters. The importance of interpreting the everyday and
the ordinary, of which animal encounters are a significant component, has been
highlighted in recent years by literary critics and theorists such as Rita Felski.4
In To the Lighthouse, we learn that Mr Ramsay decides to abandon the homo-
social world of male friendship and learning to enter family life when he sees a
hen “straddling her wings out in protection of a covey of little chicks” and finds
this “pretty, pretty” (27). This is neither the first nor last time that womanhood
will be associated with such domestic animality, in this novel or elsewhere. By
contrast, we learn of his characteristically masculine and metropolitan entitle-
ment in longing for pastoral escape from the exact same family world when he
wistfully and fantastically reflects on the intellectual freedom he has felt on
“little sandy beaches where no one had been since the beginning of time [and]
the seals sat up and looked at you” (77). Different again, Woolf characterises
 INTRODUCTION: TOWARDS AN ANIMAL-CENTRED LITERARY HISTORY 5

with grim humour the uneasy mixture of fragility and violence that marks
Ramsay’s patriarchal position—an animal encounter and a glass thrown in rage
as a result: “‘An earwig’, [his daughter] Prue murmured, awestruck, ‘in his
milk’. Other people might find centipedes. But he had built round him such a
fence of sanctity, and occupied the space with such a demeanour of majesty that
an earwig in his milk was a monster” (214–15). This insect is out of place at the
breakfast table, of course (hence the outrage). Another animal is involved but
the difference is stark when Mrs Ramsay serves, as the pièce de résistance at the
novel’s centrepiece dinner, boeuf-en-daube (a peasant dish of beef and vegeta-
bles cooked slowly in a clay pot). There, an animal in its proper place, as meat,
epitomises a rich coming together and mingling of different elements, speaking
to the commingling of consciousnesses that is the novel’s formal method.
Alongside such individual moments, literature documents the more system-
atic ways in which animal encounters are structured. As well as eating animals,
humans live with animals, work with animals, train animals, make sport of ani-
mals, trade animals, study animals, farm animals, look at animals, fight beside
animals, worship animals, make animals live and make animals die. These activi-
ties are so extensive in human societies that it is no surprise to find their signifi-
cant presence in literature. And this offers rich scope both for learning about
such important aspects of life through literature’s lens and for forms of textual
interpretation—historical; materialist; queer; feminist; colonial—that find liter-
ary meaning always embedded in social context.
At the dinner in Woolf’s novel, for instance, Charles Tansley, a rather self-­
important young philosopher and would-be politician, shows his true colours
like this: “They were talking about the fishing industry. Why did no one ask
him his opinion? What did they know about the fishing industry?” It is a fleet-
ing moment; but our understanding of the characters and their politics—and
what it means for metropolitan intellectuals to pontificate at leisure about such
things while on holiday in a community directly affected—would be helped by
knowing more about the extensive parliamentary discussion on the topic
around 1908–09, when this part of the novel is set.5 Later, we gain an insight
to the troubled marriage between Paul and Minta Rayley by way of the increas-
ingly boring husband’s practice of breeding Belgian hares, a kind of domesti-
cated rabbit (188). Our understanding of quite what a dull and ineffectual man
Paul Rayley has become is helped by knowing that there was a lucrative vogue
for this pastime, but it waned some twenty years before his interest. Elsewhere
in the novel, when Mrs Ramsay’s children laugh dismissively as she “speaks
with warmth and eloquence”, and on the basis of research, about “the iniquity
of the English dairy system” a quietly complex ironic point is made about
misogyny and the diminution of women’s expertise (112). In turn, though,
Woolf offers us Mrs Ramsay’s opinion, and her mothering, as a direct counter-
point to the violence of British colonial masculinity. When doing the work of
calming a roomful of children scared or excited out of sleep by a taxidemised
boar on the wall, she wonders “what had possessed Edward to send this horrid
skull?”(112–13). She covers it with her shawl, and reimagines it, for her
6 S. MCHUGH ET AL.

frightened daughter Cam: “it was like a bird’s nest; it was like a beautiful
mountain…with valleys and flowers and bells ringing and birds singing and
little goats and antelopes”.6 And Cam is still soothing herself with this story a
decade later (219).
Such moments indicate a truth borne out by many essays in this handbook,
that if we pay attention to the ways that human and animal lives interact—
attending to the tension, the complex relation, between animals’ lived experi-
ence and their literary representation, between their lives and what their lives
are made to signify—we can come, through literature, to encounter animal
standpoints and to understand animals’ experiences per se. This can happen in
two broad ways. The first is by way of textual strategies that decentre humanist
perception. As the ensuing essays reveal, there are too many of these to count.
To the Lighthouse, famously, comprises two long sections each covering a few
hours and one short, profoundly anti-realist section, “Time Passes”, which
covers around a decade. In the latter, the force of what has recently been called
a lively materialism, the agency of nonhuman beings and things, is epitomised
in a memorable sentence that captures nature’s counter-colonisation of the
Ramsays’ holiday house during the years the family is absent: “toads had nosed
their way in” (150).7 Elsewhere, with a quite different technique, Woolf shocks
us into thinking carefully about a moment of animal experience. This is the
imagistic chapter six of the novel’s second section in full.

[Macalister’s boy took one of the fish and cut a square out of its side to bait the
hook with. The mutilated body (it was still alive) was thrown back into the sea.]8

By devoting an entire chapter to what is presented as a kind of parenthesis to

the novel’s main action, Woolf asks us to reconsider the seemingly minor nature
of what is, from the animal’s perspective, such an extreme event. It is the multi-­
perspectival aim of her literary modernism extended, beyond subjectivity, to
the animal as object.
The second, perhaps more recognisable, way we can encounter an animal’s
standpoint entails what is often called anthropomorphism. This is a word that
is often applied, not blankly to mean the representation of animal life in human
manners or terms, but pejoratively for the misattribution of language, con-
sciousness, perception, intentionality, emotionality or the like to animals.9
Certainly, the history of literature is also a history of putting clothes on ani-
mals’ backs and words in their mouths; but that is not quite to say that such
words cannot be true to animals themselves. This handbook will offer many
accounts of how we might read through anthropomorphism to animals. One
final example from To the Lighthouse documents this dilemma too, when Mrs
Ramsay thinks of two rooks on a treetop, playfully but with obvious meaning,
as “Joseph and Mary”. Recognising them one evening, she speaks to her son
who likes to hit at them with a slingshot:
 INTRODUCTION: TOWARDS AN ANIMAL-CENTRED LITERARY HISTORY 7

“Don’t you think they mind”, she said to Jasper, “having their wings broken?”
Why did he want to shoot poor old Joseph and Mary? He shuffled a little on the
stairs, and felt rebuked, but not seriously, for she did not understand the fun of
shooting birds; that they did not feel; and being his mother she lived away in
another division of the world. (90)

Living away in another division of the world—a division not characterised

by the separation of humans from animals—is, we might say, rather a good
definition of the literature studied in this handbook, and of the interpretive
encounters with animals and animality offered in it.
We have offered this survey of examples from To the Lighthouse not because
it is especially noteworthy as a literary work about animals, but rather because
it reveals the extent to which the meaningfulness of animals, animality and
human–animal relations is hiding in plain sight in literature. As such, the novel
stands as a helpful introduction to the different ways of writing and reading
animals that follow in this handbook: from making sense of the interpretive
complexity of animal imagery to meeting the demand to read textual animals
as representations of actual animal presence; from documenting the phenom-
enological richness and complexity of animal worlds to dramatising the mean-
ingfulness of everyday animal encounters and the social practice of life with
them; and from thinking through the problematics of anthropomorphism to
developing strategies of literary form that push us beyond anthropocentric
interpretation.
That these aspects were not prioritised by Woolf’s initial critics also indicates
how the value of reading and teaching literature in this way has not always been
self-evident. Because literatures of all cultures and times include representa-
tions of nonhuman life, it is important to ask why literary animal studies has
taken shape as a sub-field only in recent decades. The history of literary criti-
cism largely reads like a handbook for the studied avoidance of animals in lit-
erature as anything but human symbols or other literary devices.10
That approach became impossible to sustain from the 1980s onwards with
the applications of poststructuralist theory to twentieth-century literature. As
reflected in many chapters of this book, Jacques Derrida’s linguistic emphasis
in deconstructive theory has proven particularly influential. Initially, it helped
to defer the problem of literary animals as human representations by identify-
ing human animality as a deconstructive element, at least, within the hierarchi-
cal and dualistic terms that oppose human to animal in dominant Eurowestern
traditions. But Derrida’s last set of lectures is proving still more significant as a
direct call to address the violence inherent in language itself, which from post-
humanist perspectives creates and maintains a limited notion of what consti-
tutes humanity with dire consequences for all who are thereby thrust out of the
human fold.11
Yet it can also be said that the recent and profound changes to scholarship
on animals in literary texts reflects a millennial turn marked by ever-growing
scales of deaths, whether through genocide, industrial slaughter, or
8 S. MCHUGH ET AL.

anthropogenic extinction, and the interlinked, disproportionate losses of and

for historically oppressed peoples. While animal studies across the disciplines
remains dominated by an emphasis on Anglophone texts and perspectives, a
propitious thread across still more literary scholarship from the 1980s works to
decolonise representations of humans, animals, and human–animal relations
alike. Recourse to Woolf’s novel allows us to foreground a problem that the
volume as a whole resists. By situating canonical literature in English amid so
many other rich texts and traditions, this volume is crafted to complement the
inroads staked by Derridean deconstruction in literary animal studies by iden-
tifying possibilities for animal stories to transform the very terms of justice,
upholding related claims of feminist and decolonial historians, philosophers,
and others that animal discourses and embodied experiences are difficult to
separate.
There are and need to be many more ways of studying and teaching animals
in literature. With the wealth of additional possibilities modelled in the pages
that follow, we make the case for why literary animal studies must remain open
and welcoming in pursuit of creative answers to a shared problem, which is, as
Tobias Linné and Helena Pedersen phrase it, “how to create a space and a lan-
guage in academia […] to speak about, and work to change, the situation and
experiences of animals in human society”.12 The global rise in meat consump-
tion in tandem with the animal rights movement is an irony which shows that,
at the very least, rights-based pro-animal logics need complementing. Reflecting
and shaping the vital and intimate structures of feeling that negotiate “between
the animals we are and the animals we aren’t”, in Philip Armstrong’s resonant
phrasing,13 the socially transformative work of literature requires that there can
be no pre-set agenda for representing—let alone imagining into being—a bet-
ter world for humans and other animals. Taking up the challenge means resist-
ing the moral solace of limiting ourselves to any one of the ways of doing
literary animal studies that seem possible now, instead holding open a space for
the possibility of more ways yet to come.
Even so, the organisation of this volume is based on a conventional division
of literary studies into distinct historical periods, with the addition of a section
on some of the theoretical underpinnings of literary animal studies and a sec-
tion on future directions for research on literary animals. In many fields of criti-
cal endeavour, following this schema would require little explanation. Academic
departments are often organised in terms of historical expertise, reflecting the
way in which the process of academic specialisation tends to involve an increas-
ing commitment to knowledge and understanding of a particular historical
period; and university courses are often subdivided in terms of this periodisa-
tion. One significant aim of this handbook is to document and analyse the
meaningful presence of animals and human–animal relations across the history
of literature in English as it is read and studied today. As such, abiding by these
periodisations is helpful because we want this handbook to be useful to stu-
dents and educators, especially those who encounter literary animals in the
context of university English studies courses without a specific focus on animals.
Another Random Scribd Document
with Unrelated Content
 JOS. ALLEINE.

[To his wife.]

My dear heart,

*
M
Y heart is now a little at rest to write to thee. I have been these
three days much disturbed. Strong sollicitations I have had
from several hands, to accept very honourable preferment; but I
have not found the invitations to suit with the inclinations of my own
heart, as I was confident they would not with thine. I have sent
away my friends satisfied with the reasons of my refusal, and now
can say, Soul, return unto thy rest. But alas, that such things should
disturb me! I would live above this lower region, that no passages
whatsoever might put me out of frame, or unsettle me from my
desired rest. I would have my heart fixed upon God, so as no
occurrences might disturb my tranquility, but I might be still in the
same quiet and even frame. Well, though I am apt to be unsettled,
yet I am like a bird out of the nest, I am never at quiet till I am in
my old way of communion with God; like the needle in the compass,
that is restless, till it be turned towards the pole.
 I can say through grace, with my soul have I desired thee in the
night, and with my spirit within me have I sought thee early; my
heart is early and late with God, ’tis the business and delight of my
life to seek him. But alas, how long shall I spend my days in wishing,
when my glorified brethren spend theirs in enjoying? As the poor
imprisoned captive sighs under his irons, and can only look through
the grate, and long for the liberty which others enjoy: such is my
condition. I can only look through the grate of this prison, my flesh;
I see Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, sitting down in the kingdom of
God. But alas, I myself must stand without, longing, praying,
waiting, for what they are enjoying. Happy souls! When shall these
fetters of mine be knocked off? When shall I be set at liberty from
this prison of my body? You are cloathed with glory, when I am
cloathed with dust. I dwell in flesh, in a house of clay, when you
dwell with God in a house not made with hands, eternal in the
heavens.
 I must be continually clogged with this cumbersome body, when
you have put on incorruption and immortality. What continual
molestation am I subject to by reason of this flesh? What pains doth
it cost me to keep this earthen vessel from breaking! It must be
exercised; and which is worst of all, cherished with time-devouring
sleep; so that I live but little of the short time I have allotted me
here. But oh blessed souls, you are swallowed up of immortality and
life, your race is run, and you have received your crown. How
cautious must I be to keep me from dangers! How apt am I to be
troubled with the cares and fears of this life, when your souls are
taken up with God and Christ, and ’tis your work to be still
contemplating, and admiring that love that redeemed you from all
this. What pains must I be at to repair the ruinous building of this
earthly tabernacle, which when I have done, I am sure will shortly
fall about my ears; when you are got far above mortality, and are
made equal with the angels. Oh! I groan earnestly to be cloathed
upon with my house which is from heaven, being willing rather to be
absent from the body and present with the Lord! Oh, when shall I
come and appear before him? When shall I receive the purchase of
my Saviour, the fruit of my prayers, the harvest of my labours, the
end of my faith, the salvation of my soul? Alas, what do I here? This
is not my resting place, my treasure is in heaven. Oh when shall I be
where my heart is? Wo is me that dwell in the tents of Kedar! Oh
that I had wings like a dove, that I might fly away and be at rest!
Then would I hasten my escape from the storm and tempest, and be
out of the reach of fears, disturbances, and distractions. How long
shall I live at such a distance from my God, at such a distance from
my country? Alas, how can I sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?
No, I will hang my harp upon the willows, and sit down and weep
when I remember Sion. But yet my flesh shall rest in hope, and I will
daily bathe my soul in the sweet thoughts of my blessed home. I will
rejoice in hopes of what I do not yet enjoy, and content myself with
the taste of what I shall shortly have my fill of.
 The Lord grant the request I daily pour out before him, and make
us furtherances to each other’s soul, that we may quicken and
promote and forward one another in his ways! Help me by thy
prayers, as thou dost always. The God of all peace and comfort be
with thee my sweet love! Farewell!

Thine beyond expression,

JOS. ALLEINE.

L E T T E R XXVI.
[God is a satisfying Portion.]

My most dear friend,

H AD not my right hand long since forgot her cunning, and the
Almighty shook the pen out of my hand, I should long e’er
this have written to thee; but it is a wonder of divine power and
goodness that my soul had not before this time dwelt in silence, and
that death had not put the long period to all my writing and
converse.
 Long is the song of love that I have to tell thee. I rejoice in the
constancy of thy love, that the waters of so long a silence, and so
great a distance have not yet quenched it. But thy desires are
towards me, and thy heart is with me, though providence hath
hindered me from thy much-desired company. I will assure thee it
hath been a pleasure to my heart a good part of this summer, to
hope that I should come one half of the way to give thee a meeting.
But such is my weakness hitherto, that I am forced to put off those
hopes till the spring, when, if God gives me strength to ride, I intend
to see thee before mine own home. I thank thee for all the dear
expressions of thy fervent love: my expences have been vast; but
surely goodness and mercy hath followed me, and do follow me in
every place, and in every change of my condition; so that as to
temporals, I have lack of nothing, and as for spirituals I abound and
superabound, and the streams of my comforts have been full and
running over. The joy of the Lord hath been my strength at the
weakest, and in the multitude of my thoughts within me, his
comforts have refreshed my soul. I have found God a satisfying
portion to me, and have sat under his shadow with full delights, and
his fruit is most sweet to my taste: he is my strength ♦and my song,
for I will talk of him, and write of him with perpetual pleasure.
Through grace I can say, methinks I am now in my element, since I
have begun to make mention of him, I am rich in him and happy in
him, and my soul saith unto him with David, Thou hast made me
most blessed for ever more. Happy is the hour that ever I was born,
to be made partaker of so blissful a treasure, so endless a felicity,
such angelical a prerogative, as I have in him: O how sweet are his
converses, how delightful it is to triumph in his love.

♦ duplicate word “and” removed

 Methinks the story of the lepers comes not unaptly to my mind,
who said one to another when they had eat and drunk and carried
away silver and gold and raiment, and went and hid it, We do not
well; this day is a day of good tidings, and we hold our peace. It is
fit that I should be cloathed with shame; I acknowledge before God,
who trieth the hearts I am unworthy, everlastingly unworthy. But it is
not fit that he should lose his praise; nay rather let him be the more
adored, and magnified and admired for ever and ever. Bless the
Lord, O my soul, bless the Lord, O my friend; let us exalt his name
together. He is my solace in my solitude; he is my standing
comforter, my tried friend, my sure refuge, my safe retreat; he is my
paradise, he is my heaven; and my heart is at rest in him: and I will
sit and sing under his shadow, as a bird among the branches. And
whither should I go but unto him? Shall I leave the fatness of the
olive, and the sweetness of the fig-tree, and of the vine, and go and
put my trust under the shadow of the bramble? No, I have made my
everlasting choice: this is my rest for ever, he is my well-beloved, in
whom I am well-pleased. Suffer me to boast a little: here I may
glory without vanity, and I can praise him without end or measure;
but I have nothing to say of myself: I find thou dost over-value me;
set the crown upon the head of Christ; let nothing be great with
thee but him, give him the glory. God that knoweth all things,
knoweth my poverty, how little, how low, and how mean I am, and
how short I come of the attainments of the saints, who yet
themselves come so exceedingly short of the rule that God hath set
before us. I often think of the complaint of the devout Monsieur De
Renty [I feel myself very poor this week; and very defective in the
love of God; if you would know wherein you can pleasure me, love
God more: that what is wanting in me may be made up in the
abundance of your love:] in this thou mayest highly pleasure me:
love God a little the better, praise him a little the more for my sake;
let me have this to please myself in, that God is a little the better
loved for me, and that I have blowed up, if it be but one spark of
divine love in the bosom of my dearest friend, towards him.
 Thy cautions are acceptable to me, I desire to provide for
manifold changes and storms. I know I am not yet in the harbour; O
pray with me that I may not enter into temptation; for I am very
weak in spirit, as well as in body, God knoweth. Somewhere or other
I must break off, and thou wilt say, it is time to shut up. For once
only know, that I am thy daily orator, and will be whilst I am. And
yet once more, I must have room to add my thankful
acknowledgment of thine. With our most dear affections to you
both, I commend you to the God of love, still abiding,

Thy fast and sure

F R I E N D.

Bath, October 12, 1668.

L E T T E R XXVII.
Dear Cousin,

T HE welcome tidings of your safe arrival at Barbadoes is come to

my ears; as also the news of your escape from a perilous
sickness, for which I bless the Lord. I have considered, that God had
bereft you of a careful father, and that your mother takes but little
care for you; so that you have none nearer than myself to watch for
your soul, and to charge and admonish you in the Lord.
 But yet, be not discouraged by these things, but look to heaven,
fly unto Jesus, put away every known sin, set upon the
conscientious performance of every known duty; make Christ your
choice, embrace him upon his own terms; deliver up yourself, body
and soul to him: see that you have no reserves nor limitations in
your choice of him; give him your very heart; cast away your worldly
hopes and expectations, make religion your business.

These things do, and you shall be sure of a friend in heaven;

and, if I may be any comfort to you, you shall not fail, while I live, to
have one friend on earth to care for you. You are gone far from me,
even to the uttermost parts of the earth: but I have sent these
letters to call after you; yea, not only to call, but to cry in your ears.
O what is like to become of your soul! Where is that immortal soul of
yours like to be lodged for ever? Amongst devils or angels? Upon a
bed of flames, or in the joys of paradise?
 Go aside; retire from the noise of the world, and say to yourself,
Oh my soul! Whither art thou going? Do not I know, that I must be
converted or condemned? That I must be sanctified, or I can never
be saved? Oh my soul! What seekest thou? What is my chief care? Is
it for this world, or the world to come? Do I first seek the kingdom
of heaven, and the righteousness thereof? Do I think heaven will
drop into my mouth? That glory and immortality will be got with a
wet finger, with cold prayers, and heartless wishes, while the world
has my heart? Do I think to be crowned, and yet never fight? To
gain the race and never run? To enter at the strait gate, and never
strive? To overcome principalities and powers, and never wrestle?
No, no; Oh my soul, either lay by the hopes of heaven for ever, or
rouse up thyself, put forth thy strength after God and glory. Either
lay by thy worldly hopes, or thy hopes of immortality; away with thy
sins, or let Christ go for ever. Think not to have Christ and the world
too, to serve God and mammon: if thou follow the world, thou must
die: the Lord hath spoken it, and all the world can never reverse it.
Thus reason the case with your own soul, and give not rest to
thyself night nor day, till you are gotten off from the world, broken
off from every known sin, and got safe into Christ.

Dear cousin, I charge you by the Lord, to observe these things.

Pray over them, weep over them, read them again and again; do not
pass them over as slight and ordinary things. Your soul is at stake; it
is your salvation which is concerned in them; think not that I am in
jest with you. I travel in birth with you, till Christ be formed in you.
Why should you die? Oh repent and live, lay hold on eternal life, win
Christ, and you win all. Oh be thankful to the Lord, that now you are
fatherless and friendless, yet you have one remembrancer to warn
you to flee from the wrath to come. God forbid that I should find you
at last in the place of torments, for your not embracing these
counsels. To conclude, I charge you as a minister, as a father, take
heed of these three things:

1. Lest the gain of the world prove the loss of your soul:
 2. Lest company draw you from God:

3. Lest a lofty or a worldly heart should thrust you out of the

kingdom of heaven.

Oh labour whatever you do for an humble heart. Be little, be vile

in your own eyes; seek not after great things; be poor in spirit:
without this, heaven will be no place for you. Your lot is fallen in a
place of great wickedness, where your soul is in much danger, where
your temptations are many, and your helps for heaven but few:
where good examples are rare, and many will entice ♦you to sin and
vanity. O! look about you, consider your danger, fear lest you should
miscarry for ever. I can but warn you and pray for you: but though
you have none to oversee you, remember the eye of God is upon
you, to observe all your actions, and that he will surely bring all your
practices into judgment. I commend you to the Lord, and remain,

Your loving and careful uncle,

JOS. ALLEINE.

August 19, 1668.

♦ “yo” replaced with “you”

L E T T E R XXVIII.
Dear friend,
* OUR letter was exceeding welcome to me, not only as reviving
Y the remembrance of our old friendship, but also, as bringing
me news of some spiritual good that you received by me, which is
the best tidings that I can receive: For what do I live for, but to be
useful to souls in my generation? *I desire no other business than to
please and honour my God, and serve my generation in that short
allowance of time I have here. Shall I commend to you the lesson
that I am about to learn? It is, to be entirely devoted to the Lord,
that I may be able to say after the apostle, To me to live is Christ. I
would not be serving God only for a day in the week, or an hour or
two in the day: but every day, and all the day. I am ambitious to
come up to that of our Lord and Master, To do always those things
that please God. I plainly see that self-seeking is self-undoing; and
that then we promote ourselves best, when we please God most. I
find, that when I have done all, if God be not pleased, I have done
nothing; and if I can but approve myself to God, my work is done: I
reckon I do not live that time I do not live to God.

*I am fain to cut off so many hours from my days, and so many

years from my life, as I have lived to myself. I find no enemy so
dangerous as myself, and O that others may take warning by my
hurt: O that I had lived wholly to God! Then had every day and
every hour that I have spent, been found upon my account at that
day: then had I been rich indeed, in treasure laid up there, whither I
am apace removing; then I had been every day and hour adding to
the heap, and increasing the reward which God of his mere grace
hath promised, even to the meanest work that is done to him. I
perceive I am an eternal loser by acting no more for God; for what is
done to myself is lost; but what is done for God, is done for ever,
and shall receive an everlasting reward. Verily, if there be a world to
come, and an eternal state after this short life, it is our only wisdom
to be removing, and, as it were transplanting and transporting what
we can, from hence into that country to which we are shortly to be
removed, that what we are now doing we may reap the fruit of for
ever.
 Well, let us be wholly swallowed up in religion, and know no
other interest but Jesus Christ. I cannot say, I have already attained;
but this is what my heart is set to learn. That in all that I do,
whether sacred or civil actions, still I may be doing but one work,
and driving on one design, That God may be pleased by me, and
glorified in me; That not only my praying, preaching, alms, may be
found upon my account; but even my eating, drinking, sleeping,
visits, discourses, because they are done to God. Too often do I miss
my mark; but I will tell you what are the rules I set myself: Never to
lie down but in the name of God; nor barely for natural refreshment,
but that a wearied servant of Christ may be recruited and fitted to
serve him better the next day. Never to rise up but with this
resolution, I will go forth this day in the name of God, and will make
religion my business, and spend the day for eternity. Never to enter
upon my calling, but first thinking, I will do these things as unto
God, because he requireth these things at my hands, in the place
and station he hath put me into. Never to sit down to the table, but
resolving, I will not eat meerly to please my appetite, but to
strengthen myself for my Master’s work. Never to make a visit, but
to leave something of God where I go; and in every company to
leave some good savor behind. This is that which I am pressing hard
after: and if I strive not to walk by these rules, let this paper be a
witness against me.

I perceive you are otherwise persuaded in some things than I

am: but however, I trust we meet in our end. May it be your whole
study to gain souls, and to build them up in holiness, which is with
too many the least of their cares. One duty (miserably neglected) I
shall be bold to recommend from my own experience, and that is,
the visiting your whole flock from house to house, and enquiring into
their spiritual estates particularly, and dealing plainly and truly with
them about their conversion to God.

You see how free I am with you: but I know your candour. I
rejoice in your happy yoke-fellow: salute her from your old friend,
and accept of the unfeigned respects of him who is, Sir,
Your real and faithful friend,

JOS. ALLEINE.
 L E T T E R XXIX.
[To a minister in prison.]

Worthy Sir,

I T was but a little after my release from my own confinement, but

I heard of yours: and now write to you, as one that hath taken
a higher degree than ever, being commenced prisoner of Christ. I
was once affected with the picture of a devout man, to whom a
voice came down from heaven, saying, Quid vis fieri pro te? To
which he answered, Nihil domine, nifi pati ac contemini pro te.
Undoubtedly, Sir, it is our real glory to be throughout conformed to
Jesus Christ, not only in his sanctity, but in his sufferings. I doubt
not your consolations in Christ superabound in all your tribulations
for him. Yet let me add this, that you have a whole shoal of promises
come in to you, which you had not before; I mean all the promises
to suffering saints, in which they have not so immediate a part,
unless in a suffering state. And doubtless he hath got well, that hath
gotten such a number of exceeding great and precious promises.
 I can tell you little good of myself: but this I can tell you, that the
promises of God were never so sweet to me, as since my imprisoned
state. It shames me that I have let such a treasure lie by so long,
and have made so little use of it. Never did my soul know the
heaven of a believer’s life, till I learnt to live a life of praise, and to
set home the unspeakable riches of the divine promises, to which,
through grace, I am made an heir. I verily perceive that all our work
were done, if we could but prevail with ourselves and others to live
like believers; to tell all the world by our carriage, that there is such
pleasantness in Christ’s ways, such beauty in holiness, such reward
to obedience, as we profess to believe!

It is but a little while that prisons shall hold us, or that we shall
dwell in dirty flesh. Porphyry tells us of Plotinus, that he was
ashamed to see himself in the body; to see a divine and immortal
soul in a prison of flesh (for so they held the body to be;) but the
worst shackles are those of sin. Well, they must shortly fall off; our
Lord doth not long intend us for this lower region: surely he is gone
to prepare a place for us: yea, and he will come again, and receive
us to himself, that where he is, we may be also. And what have we
to do, but to believe, and wait, and love, and long, and look out for
his coming, in which is all our hope? ’Twill be time enough for us to
be preferred then. We know before hand who shall then be
uppermost. Our Lord hath shewed us where our places shall be,
even at his own right hand; and what he will say to us, Come ye
blessed. Surely we shall stand in his judgment: he hath promised to
stand our friend: let us look for the joyful day: and sure as there is a
God, this day will come, and then it shall go well with us. What if
bonds and banishment abide us for a season? This is nothing but
what our Lord hath told us, The world shall rejoice, but ye shall
lament: ye shall be sorrowful, but your sorrow shall be turned into
joy. Oh how reviving are his words! I will see you again, and your
heart shall rejoice, and your joy no man taketh from you.
 If that miserable wretch leapt chearfully off the ladder, saying, I
shall be a queen in hell: with what joy should we do and suffer for
God, knowing that we shall be crowned in heaven? They are
wonderful preparations that are making for us: the Lord make us
meet to be partakers. *It was the highest commendation that ever
that worthy R. Baxter received, which fell from his scoffing adversary
Tilenus, Totum, puritanismum totus spirat. Oh that this may be true
of us and ours!

Let your true yoke-fellow, and my Christian friends with you,

have my hearty commendation: and these counsels I pray you give
them from me.

1. To habituate themselves, both as to their thoughts and

discourses, more throughly than ever to holiness. Brethren, I would
teach you the lesson that I resolve to learn, that your minds and
tongues may as naturally run upon the things of heaven, as others
on the things of this world. Why should it not be thus? I am sure
God and heaven as well deserve to be thought on, and talked of as
froth and vanity. There are many that have in a great measure learnt
this lesson, and why should not we? What if it be hard at first? Every
thing is so to a beginner. And is not ours a religion of self-denial? If
we do but force ourselves awhile to holy thoughts, and heavenly
discourse, it will grow habitual to us, and then it will be most
natural, familiar, and sweet. O what gainers will you be, if you learn
this lesson?
 ’Tis the shame of religion, that Christians are so unlike
themselves, unless upon their knees. Our lives and language should
tell the world what we are, and whither we are going. Christians, let
little things content you in the world, but aspire after great things in
the grace of God. Many little think what high degrees of holiness
they may grow up to even in this life with pains and diligence. Sirs,
be you men of great designs: think it not enough if you have
wherewith to bear your charges to heaven; but aspire to be great in
the court of heaven, favourites of the Most High, of tall growth,
singular communion, that you may burn and shine in your place,
that you may savour of heaven wherever you come, and that there
may be an even-spun thread of holiness running through your whole
course. ’Tis our disgrace, that there is so little difference to be seen
in the ordinary conversation of believers and other men. Is it not a
shame, that when we are in company with others, this should be all
the difference that is to be seen, that we will not curse and swear? If
you will honour the gospel, bring forth your religion out of your
closets into your shops, trades, visits, and exemplify the rules of
religion in the management of all your relations, and in your ordinary
converse. Let there be no place or company that you come into, in
which you do not drop something of God; this will be the glory of
religion, and we shall never convince the world ’till we come to this.
May you come, my brethren, out of your prisons with your faces
shining, having your minds seasoned, and your tongues tipt with
holiness! May your mouths be as a well of life, from whence may
flow the holy streams of edifying discourse! May you ever remember,
as you are sitting in your houses, going by the way, lying down,
rising up, what the Lord doth then require of you.
 2. To improve their present retirements from the world, for the
settling their spiritual estates. ’Tis a common complaint amongst
Christians, that they want assurance. Oh, if any of you that wanted
assurance when you came to prison, may carry that blessing out,
what happy gainers would you be? Now you are called more than
ever to self-searching. Now bring your graces to the touchstone. Be
much in self observation. Rest not in probable hopes. Think not that
it is enough that you can say, you hope ’tis well. Be restless till you
can say, that you know ’tis well; that you know you are passed from
death to life.

*Think not that this is a privilege that only a few may expect.
Observe but these three things:

1. To take heed of laying the marks of salvation either too high or

too low;

2. To be much in observing the frame, and bent, and workings of

your own heart:

3. To be universally conscientious, and to be constant in even

and close walking, and then I doubt not but you will have a settled
assurance, and know and feel that peace of God that passeth all
understanding.

I wish your prison may be a paradise of peace, and a Patmos of

divine discoveries, Lord Jesus set to thy Amen. I am, Sir,

Your unworthy brother and companion in the kingdom and

patience of Jesus,

JOS. ALLEINE.

January 10, 1664.

 L E T T E R XXX.
To the most beloved people, the servants of God in
Taunton, salvation.

Most dearly beloved and longed for,

my joy and crown.

M Y heart’s desire and prayer for you is, that you may be saved.
This is that which I have been praying and studying, and
preaching for these many years: and this is the end of my suffering,
and writing at this present time. I seek not other gifts, give me your
hearts, let me but part between your sins and you: suffer me but to
save you; give me leave to carry you over to Jesus Christ, and I will
not ask you any more. I will serve you gladly, I will suffer for you
thankfully, so I may but save you. Do not wonder why I follow you
so pressingly, why I call upon you so frequently; let not my
importunity be grievous to you, all this is but to save you. Christ did
not think his blood, and shall I think my breath too dear in order to
your salvation; what pity is it, that any of you should miscarry at
last, under the power of ignorance, or by a profane negligence, or a
formal and lifeless profession of strict godliness?
 Beloved, I am afraid of you, lest (as to many of you) I have run
in vain. I cannot but thankfully acknowledge, that there are not a
few of you who are the joy of your ministers, and the glory of Christ.
But it cannot be dissembled, that far the greater number give little
ground to hope, they are in the state of salvation. And must not this
be a pinching thought to a compassionate teacher, that he cannot
persuade men, but that the most of them will wilfully throw away
themselves? Is it not a woeful sight, to behold the devils driving a
great part of our miserable flocks, (as they did once the herd of
swine) violently down the hill, till they be choaked in the water,
drowned in the gulph of endless perdition? Ah miserable spectacle!
What through the wilful blindness of some, the looseness and
sensuality of others, the halving, and cold, and customary religion of
others, how great a number of our poor flocks, is Satan like to carry
utterly away from us, after all that hath been done to save him?
 Yet I cannot but call after them. Hearken unto me, O ye children.
How long will ye love vanity, and trust in lying words? As the Lord
liveth, you are lost, except you turn: wherefore turn yourselves and
live ye. Ah how mercy wooeth you! How it waiteth to be gracious?
Hear, O sinners, hear. See you not how the merciful Saviour of the
world stretcheth forth his hands all the day long, and spreadeth
forth his wings, and calleth you as a hen doth her chickens! Hear
you not the sounding of his bowels? He hath no need of you: Yet
how do his compassions melt over perishing sinners? His heart is
turned within him, and shall not this turn your hearts? His repentings
are kindled together, and shall not this lead you to repentance?
Behold, he standeth at the door and knocketh. O man, wilt thou
keep Jesus at the door, and lodge Barabbas in thy bosom? Oh his
melting love to sinners! He calleth after them, he weepeth over
them, he crieth to them. How long, ye simple ones, will you love
simplicity? Will you not be made clean? When shall it once be? Why
will you die? Turn you at my reproof: behold, I will pour out my spirit
upon you. Sinner, art thou not yet melted? Oh come in at his loving
calls. Come out from thy sins: touch the scepter of grace and live:
Why shouldst thou be dashed in pieces by his iron rod? Kiss the Son:
Why shouldst thou perish in the way? Set up Jesus as thy king, lest
he count thee for his enemy, because thou would not that he should
reign over thee, and so thou be called forth and slain before him. Oh
how dreadful will this case be, to die by the hand of a Saviour! Oh
double hell, to have thy Redeemer become thy executioner! And the
hand that was so long stretched forth to save thee, to be now
stretched forth to slay thee! And the merciful heart of Christ himself
hardened against thee, so that he should call thee forth, and hew
thee in pieces, as Samuel did Agag before the Lord.

*Beloved, I despair of ever bringing you to salvation, without

sanctification: or possessing you with happiness without persuading
you to holiness. God knows I have not the least hope ever to see
one of your faces in heaven, except you be sanctified, and exercise
yourselves unto godliness. This is that I drive at, I beseech you
study to further personal godliness, and family godliness.
 *1. Personal godliness. Let it be your first care to set up Christ in
your hearts. See that you make all your worldly interests stoop to
him, that you be entirely and unreservedly devoted to him. If you
deliberately and ordinarily harbour any sin, you are undone. See that
you unfeignedly take the laws of Christ, as the rule of your words,
thoughts and actions; and subject your whole man, faithfully to him.
If you have a true respect unto all God’s commandments, you are
sound at heart. O study to get the image and impress of Christ upon
you within. Begin with your hearts, else you build without a
foundation. Labour to get a saving change within, or else all external
performances will be to no purpose. And then study to shew forth
the power of godliness in your life. Let piety be your business. ’Tis
the highest point of justice, to give God his due. Beware that none
of you be a prayerless person: for that is a certain discovery of a
Christless, and a graceless person. Suffer not your bibles to gather
dust. See that you converse daily with the word. That man can
never lay claim to blessedness, whose delight is not in the law of the
Lord. Let meditation and self-examination be your daily exercise,
else the Papists, yea the Pagans will condemn us. If ever you come
to any growth in holiness, without the constant use of this practice, I
am grossly deceived. And therefore I beseech, yea even charge you
by the Lord, that you would daily examine yourselves.
 But piety without charity is but the half of Christianity, or rather
impious hypocrisy. See therefore that you do justly, and love mercy,
and let equity, and charity run like an even thread, through all your
dealings. Be you temperate in all things, and let chastity and
sobriety be your undivided companions. Let truth and purity,
seriousness and modesty, heavenliness and gravity, be the constant
ornaments of your speech. Let patience and humility, simplicity and
sincerity shine in all parts of your conversation. See that you forget
and forgive wrongs, and requite them with kindness. Be merciful in
your censures, and put the most favourable construction upon your
brethren’s carriage. Be slow in promising, punctual in fulfilling. Let
meekness, innocency, affableness, yieldingness, and courtesy,
commend your conversation to all men. Let none of your relations
want that love and loyalty, that reverence and duty, that tenderness,
care, and vigilancy, which their several places and capacities call for.
This is true godliness. I charge you before the most high God, that
none of you be found a swearer, or a liar, a lover of evil company, or
a scoffer, or malicious, or covetous, or a drunkard, or a glutton,
unrighteous in his dealing, unclean in his living, or a quarreller, or a
thief, or backbiter, or a railer: for I denounce unto you from the
living God, that damnation is the end of all such.

2. Family godliness. He that hath set up Christ in his heart, will

be sure to study to set him up in his house. Let every family with
you be a Christian church; every house a house of prayer; every
houshold a houshold of faith. Let every housholder say, with Joshua,
I, with my house, will serve the Lord, and with David, I will walk
within my house with a perfect heart.

First, Let religion be in your families, not as a matter by the by,

but the standing business of the house. Let them have your prayers
as duly as their meals. Is there any of your families, but have time
for their taking food? *Wretched man! Canst thou find time to eat,
and not time to pray?
 *Secondly, Settle it upon your hearts, that your souls are bound
up in the souls of your family. They are committed to you, and (if
they be lost through your neglect) will be required at your hands:
Sirs, if you do not, you shall know that the charge of souls is a heavy
charge, and that the blood of souls is a heavy guilt. O man, hast
thou a charge of souls to answer for, and dost thou not yet bestir
thyself for them, that their blood may not be found in thy skirts? Wilt
thou do no more for immortal souls, than thou wilt do for the beasts
that perish? What dost thou do for thy children, and servants? Thou
providest meat and drink for them, and dost thou not the same for
thy beasts? Thou givest them medicines, and cherishest them when
they are sick, and dost thou not so much for thy swine? More
particularly.

1. Let the solemn reading of the word, and singing of psalms, be

your family exercises. See Christ singing with his family, his disciples,
Matthew xxvi. 30. Luke ix. 18.

2. Let every person in your family be duly called to an account of

their profiting by the word heard or read, as they are about doing
your own business. This is a duty of consequence unspeakable, and
would be a means to bring those under your charge to remember
and profit by what they receive.

3. Often take account of the souls under your care, concerning

their spiritual estates. Make enquiry into their conditions, insist much
upon the sinfulness and misery of their natural estate, and upon the
necessity of regeneration, in order to their salvation. Admonish them
gravely of their sins; encourage beginnings. Follow them earnestly,
and let them have no quiet for you, till you see in them a saving
change. This is a duty of high consequence, but fearfully neglected
by some. Doth not conscience say, Thou art the man?
 4. Look to the strict sanctifying of the sabbath by all of your
housholds. Many poor families have little time else. O improve but
your sabbath days as diligently in doing your Maker’s work, as you
do the other days in doing your own work, and I doubt not but you
may come to some proficiency.

5. Let the morning and evening sacrifice of solemn prayer, be

daily offered up in all your families. Beware they be not found
among the families that call not upon God’s name; for why should
there be wrath from the Lord upon your families? O miserable
families without God in the world, that are without family prayer!
What have you so many family sins, family wants, family miseries;
what, and yet no family prayers? How do you pray with all prayer
and supplication if you do not with family prayer? Say not I have no
time. What hast thou all thy time on purpose to serve God and save
thy soul, and is this that for which thou can’st find no time? Pinch
out of your meals and sleep, rather than want for prayer. *Say not,
my business will not give leave. This is thy greatest business, to save
thyself, and the souls committed to thee. In a word, the blessing of
all is to be got by prayer. And what is thy business without God’s
blessing? Say not, I am not able. Use thy one talent, and God will
increase it. Helps are to be had till thou art better able.

*6. Put every one in your families upon private prayer. Observe
whether any perform it. Get them the help of a form, if they need it,
till they are able to go without. Direct them how to pray, by minding
them of their sins, wants, and mercies, the materials of prayer.
 7. Set up catechizing in your families, at least once every week. It
was my parting, dying request, that you would set up and maintain
this duty in your families. Have you all done it accordingly? Cannot
your confidences witness, cannot your families witness you have
not? Well, I thought my parting words would have done something
with you: I hoped the fervent request of a dying minister, would
have prevailed for such a small matter with you. To this day are you
without solemn catechizing in your houses! Ah, what a
discouragement to your teacher is this? Brethren shall I yet prevail
with you? Will you reject me also? O let me persuade you before you
take off your eyes from these lines, to resolve to set upon the
constant exercise of this duty. Surely I have done and suffered more
for you than this comes to: Will you deny me? I beseech you, let me
find, if ever God brings me again to visit your houses, that the words
of a suffering minister have some power with you. I have sent you
help on purpose: What shall all my persuasions be but speaking to
the wind? Beloved, have you no dread of the Almighty’s charge, that
you should teach these things diligently to your children, and talk of
them as you sit in your houses, and train them up in the way they
should go? Hath God so commanded Abraham, that he would teach
his children and his houshold, Genesis xviii. 19. and given such a
promise to him thereupon, and will not you put in for a share of
either in the praise or the promise? Say not, they are careless and
will not learn. What have you your authority for, if not to use it for
God, and the good of their souls? You will call them up, and force
them to do their work; and should you not at least be as zealous in
putting them upon God’s work? Say not, they are dull and not
capable. If they be dull, God requires of you the more pains and
patience; but dull as they are, you will make them learn how to
work; and can they not learn how to live? Are they capable of the
mysteries of your trade, and are they not capable of the plain
principles of religion? Well, as ever you would see the growth of
religion, the cure of ignorance, the remedy of profaneness, the
downfal of error, fulfil ye my joy with going through with this duty.
 I have been long and yet I am afraid my letter will be ended
before my work is done: how loath am I to leave you, before I have
prevailed with you to set to this work? Will you pass your promise,
will you give me your hands? Oh that you would? You cannot do me
a greater pleasure. Beloved, why should you not give the hand one
to another, and mutually engage to each other, for more vigorous
and diligent endeavours, in promoting family godliness? I must tell
you, God looks for more than ordinary from you, in such a day as
this. He expects that you should do both in your hearts and in your
houses, somewhat more than ever, under these extraordinary
dispensations. My most dearly beloved, mine own bowels in the
Lord, will you satisfy the longings of a travelling minister? will you
answer the calls of divine providence? Would you that your children
should bless you? Oh, then set up piety in your families. As ever you
would be blessed or be a blessing, let your heart, and your houses
be the temples of the living God, in which his worship (according to
the fore-mentioned directions) may be with constancy reverently
performed.

O FATHER of Spirits, that hast set me over thy flock to watch for
their souls as one that must give account: I have long studied
thy will, and taught in thy name, and do unfeignedly bless thee, that
any have believed my report. I have given unto them the words
which thou gavest me, and they have received them. I have
manifested thy name unto them, and they have kept thy word. And
now I am no more with them, but I come unto thee! Holy Father,
keep them through thine own name; for they are thine. As they have
kept the word of thy patience, so keep thou them in the hour of
temptation. They are but a little and helpless flock: but thou art their
shepherd, suffer them not to want. Do thou feed them, and fold
them. Let thy rod and thy staff comfort them, and let not the beasts
of prey fall upon them, to the spoiling of their souls.
 But what shall I do for them that will not be gathered? I have
called after them, but they would not answer; I have charged them
in thy name, but they would not hear; I have studied to speak
persuasively to them, but I cannot prevail. Then I said, I have
laboured in vain; I have spent my strength for nought, yet I cannot
give them over, much less may I give thee over. Lord, persuade
Japhet to dwell in the tents of Shem. Lord compel them to come in,
and lay thy hands of mercy upon them, as thou didst on lingering
Lot, and bring them forth, that they may escape for their lives, and
not be consumed. Lord, I pray thee open their eyes that they may
see, and lay hold upon their hearts by thy omnipotent grace. Do
thou turn them, and they shall be turned: O bring back the
miserable captives, and suffer not the enemy of mankind to drive a
way the most of the flock before mine eyes, and to deride the
fruitless endeavours of thy labourers, and boast over them, that he
can do more with them, though he seek to ruin them, than all the
beseechings, counsels, and charges of thy servants, that seek to
save them. Lord, if I could find out any thing that would pierce
them, that would make its way into their hearts, thou knowest I
would use it. But I have been many years pleading thy cause in vain.
O let not these endeavours also be lost. O God, find out every
ignorant, every profane sinner, every prayerless soul, and every
prayerless family, and convince them of their miserable condition
while without thee in the world. Set thy image up in their souls, set
up thy worship in their families. Let not pride, ignorance, or sloth
keep them in neglect of the means of knowledge. Let thine eyes be
over the place of my desires for good, from one end of the year to
the other end thereof. Let every house therein be a seminary of
religion, and let those that cast their eyes upon these lines, find thee
sliding in by the secret influence of thy grace into their hearts, and
engaging them to do thy pleasure. Amen. Amen.

JOS. ALLEINE.
 A W O R D to a

S A B B A T H - B R E A K E R.
Remember the sabbath-day to keep it holy.

H AVE you forgotten who spoke these words? Or do you set him
at defiance? Do you bid him do his worst? Have a care. You
are not stronger than he. Let the potsherd strive with the potsherds
of the earth: but woe unto the man that contendeth with his Maker;
he sitteth on the circle of the heavens: and the inhabitants of the
earth are as grasshoppers before him!

Six days shalt thou do all manner of work. But the seventh day is
the sabbath of the Lord thy God. It is not thine, but God’s day. He
claims it for his own. He always did claim it for his own, even from
the beginning of the world. In six days the Lord made heaven and
earth, and rested the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the
Sabbath-day and hallowed it. He hallowed it; that is, he made it
holy: he reserved it for his own service. He appointed, that as long
as the sun or the moon, the heavens and the earth should endure,
the children of men should spend this day in the worship of him,
who gave them life and breath and all things.

Shall a man then rob God? And art thou the man? Consider, think
what thou art doing. Is it not God who giveth thee all thou hast?
Every day thou livest, is it not his gift? And wilt thou give him none?
Nay, wilt thou deny him what is his own already? He will not, he
cannot quit his claim. This day is God’s. It was so from the
beginning. It will be so to the end of the world. This he cannot give
to another. O render unto God the things that are God’s: Now! To-
day, while it is called to-day!
 For whose sake does God lay claim to this day? For his sake, or
for thine? Doubtless, not for his own. He needeth not thee, nor any
child of man. Look unto the heavens and see, and behold the clouds
which are higher than thou. If thou sinnest, what dost thou against
him? If thy transgressions be multiplied, what dost thou unto him? If
thou art righteous, what givest thou him? Or what receiveth he of
thine hand? For thy own sake therefore, God thy Maker doth this.
For thy own sake he calleth thee to serve him. For thy own sake, he
demands a part of thy time to be restored to him that gave thee all.
Acknowledge his love. Learn, while thou art on earth to praise the
king of heaven. Spend this day, as thou hopest to spend that day
which never shall have an end.

The Lord not only hallowed the sabbath-day, but he hath also
blessed it. So that you are an enemy to yourself. You throw away
your own blessing, if you neglect to keep this day holy. It is a day of
special grace. The king of heaven now sits upon his mercy-seat, in a
more gracious manner than on other days, to bestow blessings on
those who observe it. If you love your own soul, can you then
forbear laying hold on so happy an opportunity? Awake, arise, Let
God give thee his blessing! Receive a token of his love! Cry to him
that thou may’st find the riches of his grace and mercy in Christ
Jesus! You do not know, how few more of these days of salvation
you may have. And how dreadful would it be, to be called hence in
the abuse of his proffered mercy.
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