ABSTRACT
This chapter raises several central questions for animal literary studies in the context of eighteenth-century British literature and culture. Some of these questions include whether, how, and how well humans access animal subjectivity and communicate or represent that subjectivity, whether anthropomorphizing animals constitutes a violation of animal rights, what kinds of rights and welfare discourses are implicit to and played-out in such violations, and whether the animal autobiography as a literary strategy deepens or confounds our understandings of-and relationships tothe animal other. In this way, I mirror or mimic Elspeth Probyn by using the “autobiographical as a means of inquiry within the analysis of social formations” (Probyn 1993, 101). I am also following Jacques Derrida’s outline of the hopes and risks of the autobiography as “always threatened with becoming auto-immunizing . . . poisonous for oneself in the fi rst place, auto-infectious for the presumed signatory who is so auto-aff ected” (Derrida 2008, 47). With its double consciousness of author and animal it is essential to ask if the animal autobiography is good for the either the animal or the author . . . or for us.
