ABSTRACT
The academic market has experienced a surge in books and articles written on posthumanism in the past two decades. More recently, some scholars insist that we are in a post-postmodern period, although they are not certain what that is and how it differs from postmodernism. Likewise, we have gorged ourselves on theory and analysis in the burgeoning academic, interdisciplinary field generally known as animal studies. The most current debate in that forum is about anthropomorphism with thinly veiled condemnations that to write anthropomorphically is an atrocity. Animals and Their Children does attempt to avoid anthropomorphism as much as possible but is ambivalent about the necessity of eschewal. As the volume’s title implies, the essays focus on the animals in the literature of the nineteenth century, identifying their perspectives that taught and reproduced themselves in human children. As for the introduction’s title, whether the animals are the little beasts in children’s literature and if they are on tight leashes or if the children are one or the other or if the epithets and metaphors apply to both can lend themselves to debate and useful intellectual inquiry. The introduction gives a brief history of the controversy of posthumanism, followed by an account of where the controversy stands per publications from 2013 to the present, and then it segues into a summary of the volume’s chapters as to what they contribute to the debate.
