Book Project

Even before the publication of On the Origins of Species, the Victorians were obsessed with crafting the dog’s physical appearance with selective breeding practices. Simultaneously, they took to crafting the dog’s interior life in literature. Neither preoccupation has shown signs of slowing down since. The word “mongrel” in my title thus functions in two ways: it offers a general image of the dog in transition and, as an adjective, encapsulates the book’s argument that this transition played out in genre as well as genes. The first half contends that, by the nineteenth century, literary genres which once only represented humans were under pressure to represent animals, as well: a shift made possible by dissenting theologians who made space for the idea that animals might have souls. These chapters examine how primarily lesser known authors tweaked popular subgenres to challenge the basic principles of anthropocentrism. The second half turns to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, when so-called “literary”—what we might even call purebred—genres by more prominent authors took up the ethical questions about petkeeping and ventriloquism initially raised by the dog literature of the long nineteenth century. In these texts, matters of animal ethics replace the matters of doctrine that had dominated two hundred years before. This secular shift emphasizes both the practical role religious belief played in human-animal relationships in the nineteenth century and the continuity between doctrine and the modern concept of “ethics-as-religion.”