ORCID Identifier(s)

0000-0001-5367-367X

Graduation Semester and Year

2016

Language

English

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy in English

Department

English

First Advisor

Stacy Alaimo

Abstract

This dissertation fills a gap in the study of early American natural history literature by investigating the representation of animal bodies within early American natural history writing and attending to the role animal bodies play in shaping natural history knowledge and how natural history in turn shapes animal bodies. It also examines the effect the shifting materiality of animal bodies has on constructions of race and ethnicity in early America, as well as the ways non-white, non-male, and non-human persons exercise agency via natural history correspondence networks. Employing animal studies, posthumanism, and new materialism, I contend that, within natural history’s correspondence networks, there occurs a constant circulation of ideas and information, as well as materials and bodies. Providing a crucial link between real animals and representations of them, specimens offer convincing, tangible proof of the natural world, allowing a more effective vicarious experience of American animals than just words or images. They enrich and enliven verbal and visual descriptions of them, but at the same time serve as reminders of how incomplete and partial a grasp natural history has over animals. Strange and Unstable Bodies incorporates media theory concepts of recursive feedback loops and media materiality, arguing that there exists a similar interplay in natural history discourse between information and materiality. Animal bodies complicate this interplay; in circulating through correspondence networks, they exist both as abstract symbols and as real material, alternately embodied, disembodied, and re-embodied. Attending to the circulation of information and material and how it affects and is affected by nonhuman bodies shows how the shifting materiality of animal bodies in natural history results in changing forms of nonhuman agency and creaturehood, and offers a reevaluation of how humans construct knowledge from the material world.

Keywords

Early American literature, Natural history, Correspondence networks, Animals, Animal bodies, Animal studies, New materialism, Materiality, Creaturehood

Disciplines

Arts and Humanities | English Language and Literature

Comments

Degree granted by The University of Texas at Arlington

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