ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the critical re-reading of Black Beauty at reading its sentimentalism as a form of renegotiating the human-animal relationship amidst Victorian modernity. It contextualizes the novel within the discourse of sentimentalism promoted by the sentimental novel in Britain and the United States since the late eighteenth century as it places the novel in the context of affect theory. While promoting the need to recognize the status of the horse as a being needing adequate living conditions, rest, and care, the novel also reveals some of the reasons for the maltreatment horses in a world containing little social justice. While sentimental abolitionist writing foregrounded the suffering black body to support its critique of slavery, Sewell's representation of the animal body utilizes similar scenes of physical violence in order to show the cruelty of contemporary animal treatment. With particular reference to human-animal studies, Birke argues that analysis of performativity may open up new perspectives by challenging 'the human/animal divide'.
