| Abstract | Only the Animals by Ceridwen Dovey is a contemporary Anglophone collection of short stories, written by a postcolonial author, that centers animal subjectivities – i.e. the souls of ten dead animals implicated, each in their own way, in historical global conflicts from the 19th century to present times – as its narrators and focalizers. The collection is constructed as a pastiche of previous literary works that center animals, which makes it heavily intertextual. Likewise, it is accompanied by a list of sources that brings into focus the artificiality of its construction, making the work metafictional. By employing postcolonial ecocriticism alongside studies of animal narration as its critical apparatus, this thesis expands on previous ecocritical readings of Only the Animals and argues for a reading that takes into consideration both the figuring of animal-as-animal, and human-as-animal. Through its animal narrators, Only the Animals unpacks animal oppression within human colonial and warring projects by exploring both animal complicity and animal oppression within anthropogenic conflicts. While it does constitute an act of speaking for animals, the collection successfully constructs a zoocentric perspective rather than succumbing to anthropocentrism, and functions as an act of minor literature on behalf of its animal narrators through its use of intertextuality and zoological and ethological accuracy. Likewise, through its figuring of animal subjectivities as the focalizers, Only the Animals follows the post-Darwinian turn in animal fables, i.e. it represents animals as equal to, rather than lesser than humans. The animal narrators’ commentary on both humans and human literature engages in a critical, posthumanist perspective of human-animal relationships that challenges anthropocentrism and western human attitudes towards animal life. Dovey’s collection, as this thesis argues, is thus an act of radical rewriting of animal narratives and histories that challenges the notion of human superiority and utilizes literary representation as a means of renegotiating the cultural treatment of animals in a shared human-animal world. |
