Discusses the production and circulation of animal narratives in colonial India in order to investigate the constructs of animals played into a variety of forms of othering that took place in England during its imperial venture.

British India and Victorian Culture extends current scholarship on the Victorian period with a wide-ranging and innovative analysis of the literature of British India.

Argues that the Bloomsbury group's fascination with beasts was integral to their exploration of imperialism, race, gender, sexuality and technology.

Examines how liberal thought influenced representations of animals within nineteenth-century animal welfare discourse and the Victorian novel.

This third edition of Hans Bertens’ bestselling book is an essential guide to the often confusing and complicated world of literary theory. Exploring a broad range of topics from Marxist and feminist criticism to postmodernism and new historicism Literary Theory: The Basics covers contemporary topics including: reception theory and reader response theory the new criticism of postmodernism the ‘after theory’ debate post-humanism, biopolitics and animal studies aesthetics Literary Theory: The Basics helps readers to approach the many theories and debates in this field with confidence. Now with updated case studies and further reading this is an essential purchase for anyone who strives to understand literary theory today.

This book explores representations of animals and animality across the span of literary history, from the Middle Ages to the present.

This book coins the term ‘imperial beast fable’ to explore modern forms of human-animal relationships and their origins in the British Empire. Taking as a starting point the long nineteenth-century fascination with non-European beast fables, it examines literary reworkings of these fables, such as Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Books, in relation to the global politics of race, language, and species. The imperial beast fable figures variably as a key site where the nature and origins of mankind are hotly debated; an emerging space of conservation in which humans enclose animals to manage and control them; a cage in which an animal narrator talks to change its human jailors; and a vision of animal cosmopolitanism, in which a close kinship between humans and other animals is dreamt of. Written at the intersection of animal studies and postcolonial studies, this book proposes that the beast fable embodies the ideologies and values of the British Empire, while also covertly critiquing them. It therefore finds in the beast fable the possibility that the multitudinous animals it gives voice to might challenge the imperial networks which threaten their existence, both in the nineteenth century and today.