Animal Victims in Modern Fiction: From Sanctity to Sacrifice

The Darwinian revolution profoundly altered society's conception of animals. Scholtmeijer explores the ways in which modern literature has reflected this change in its attempts to deal with the reality of the autonomous animal and the animal victim. She considers works of fiction dealing with animal victims in the wild and in urban settings, how they are used to represent human sexual dilemmas, and how the hopes and disillusionments invested in myth generate animal victims. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR