Animal Stories

Beginning with a historical account of why animal stories pose endemic critical challenges to literary and cultural theory, Animal Stories argues that key creative developments in narrative form became inseparable from shifts in animal politics and science in the past century. Susan McHugh traces representational patterns specific to modern and contemporary fictions of cross-species companionship through a variety of mediaincluding novels, films, fine art, television shows, and digital gamesto show how nothing less than the futures of all species life is at stake in narrative forms. McHughs investigations into fictions of people relying on animals in civic and professional lifemost obviously those of service animal users and female professional horse ridersshowcase distinctly modern and humananimal forms of intersubjectivity. But increasingly graphic violence directed at these figures indicates their ambivalent significance to changing configurations of species. Reading these developments with narrative adaptations of traditional companion species relations during this period queer pet memoirs and farm animal fictionsMcHugh clarifies the intercorporeal intimaciesthe perforations of species boundaries now proliferating in genetic and genomic scienceand embeds the representation of animals within biopolitical frameworks.