Creating Animal Experience in Late Eighteenth-Century Narrative

Abstract

Late eighteenth-century children's fiction with animal protagonists played a part in the period's rethinking of animal–human relations. Writers including Dorothy Kilner, Sarah Trimmer, Anna Letitia Barbauld, John Aikin and, most notably, Edward Augustus Kendall represented animal characters in new ways. A combination of influences from the philosophy of sympathy and from contemporary natural history shaped their enactment of a partial shift in animal representation from the fabular, the allegorical and the satirical to the naturalistic and empathetic. Drawing on new narrative techniques for the representation of mind in fiction, they pioneered attempts to imagine the experience of non-human animals.