ABSTRACT
Philip Armstrong, author of the monograph Sheep, reports that he met a living sheep only by going to a pet farm as part of his research. Although premodernist precedents lacked the values and concerns of the present, they have the advantage of creation from familiarity with sheep and other beings. Can “A Sheep’s Eye View” be said to give agency to the sheep? But again, the structure mirrors a bigger literary dimension: expected order is overturned in giving the sheep language, which in turn mirrors the overturning of the good order of care and respect for the animals shown by the people involved. As a regional writer, E. O. Schlunke created a literature in which the human is only one participant among innumerable interdependent agents, including sheep. The sheep describes itself committing acts that show it becoming a picaresque hero, alienated from other sheep and people alike.
