Julie A. Smith’s “Representing Animal Minds in Early Animal Autobiography: Charlotte Tucker’s The Rambles of a Rat and Nineteenth-Century Natural History.”

摘要

Julie A. Smith’s article enriches our understanding of early animal autobiography andits roots in natural history and the nineteenth-century science of nonhuman animals.Building on the research of scholars including Tess Cosslett and Harriet Ritvo, Smith’sarticle discusses the roots, features and functions of early animal autobiography – “afirst-person fictional narrative in which an animal tells its own story” (725). Thisdiscussion indicates, first, that recent “posthumanist” animal autobiographies areindebted to these precursors, which already “took animals’ minds seriously” (726), and,second, that natural history did not only function to disseminate “the early moderndiscourse of reason that excluded animals” (742). This is a timely and instructiveargument, even though Smith’s paper raises more questions than it can answer.