Chapter 2 - Reading, Feeling, Acting

Summary

Chapter 2 traces the emergence of humane literary genealogies and animal-centred literary criticism. These new kinds of writing reveal the movement’s creative efforts to simultaneously draw from and re-imagine the canon in order the present a longstanding accord between literature and animal protectionism. The chapter then argues that reformers such as Frances Power Cobbe, Henry Salt, and Stephen Coleridge tried to establish a connection between aesthetic experience, ethical awareness, and political action; by carefully choreographing the appearance of stories, poems, and literary-criticism, association periodicals played a vital role in managing textual encounters and responses. However, expressions of excessive sentiment often endangered the efficacy, public image, and political legitimacy of the cause. The movement’s efforts to promote literary writing and antivivisectionism as natural bedfellows raised problems as well as opportunities: ‘Dipping’ into literary works and traditions was rarely carefree.