ABSTRACT
The animals that have a presence in literature, from the earliest poems in existence to the literary works of our own day, have too often been hidden in plain sight. A literary animal studies recovers and weighs the ramifications of such knowledge, knowledge compacted into the common name, knowledge that has gone into shaping human beings’ centuries-long relationship with the creature. The literary study of animals is sensitive to the possibility that some works of literature attempt to let an animal speak its own name. When the literary animal is used as a metaphor for human concerns, its relation to animal life outside the text pushed into the background, representation arguably takes part in the human oppression of other creatures. The animal agency whose traces can be discerned even in the operations of metaphor takes center stage in our second section, “Plotting Agency.”.
