Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses

Introduction: Critical Animal Studies

2025-03-28T09:13:37+00:00

The Supercats: Portrayals of Cats in Texts of Celtic Origin

2025-03-28T09:23:51+00:00

Cats have been featured in various cultural texts, teaching and setting examples to or, on the contrary, opposing humans. Not only would the reality without the presence of a cat in the text be less unpredictable, but specific plot changes could also not occur. Despite being present in the world’s literature for centuries, cats are one of the most underappreciated and misunderstood species, often used and abused by writers portraying complex, challenging, and forbidden aspects of people’s lives, the Celts being no exception. Felines portrayed in texts of Celtic origin are, in most stories, treacherous creatures prone to deception and mischief and need to be eradicated. Stories covering cats with bad reputations have been retold throughout the centuries, validating their ill-treatment in the non-fictional world. The analysis of the character of Grimalkin provides a fascinating insight into the early symbolic and disturbing world of the most ambiguous and volatile relationships the animal world and humankind have ever known: cats and people.

“How Much They Can Teach us”: Lorna Crozier’s Portrayal of NonHuman Animals

2025-03-28T09:31:37+00:00

Drawing on literary animal studies theory, ecopoetry and material ecocriticism, and following Shapiro and Copeland’s (2005) analysis criteria, this article examines Lorna Crozier’s depiction of non-human animals in her poems. The corpus consists of the poetry and photography collections The Wild in You (2015) and The House the Spirit Builds (2019), and the prose poetry collection God of Shadows (2018). I contend that Crozier criticises the human abuse of the nonhuman world; proposes ways for humans to discard anthropocentrism in favour of biocentrism; and grants saliency to insects, rodents, amphibians, and reptiles as animal species that have usually been despised in the West.

Dog Autobiographies and English Canine Melodrama: The Life of Carlo, the Famous Dog of the Drury-Lane Theatre (1806)

2025-03-28T09:39:24+00:00

This article aims to examine Elizabeth Fenwick’s narrative, The Life of Carlo, or the Famous Dog of Drury-Lane Theatre (1806), through the lens of the melodramatic conventions that informed Frederick Reynolds’s play, The Caravan; or the Driver and His Dog (1803), upon which the story is based. Focusing on the centrality of the dog in both works, the study first explores the key elements of classical melodrama evident in the play and the novel. It then investigates how Fenwick’s narrative engages with nineteenth-century discourses on the relationship between childhood and non-human animals. Finally, the analysis situates Fenwick’s work within the framework of classical melodrama’s ideal of citizenship, particularly as it relates to childhood and the domestication of animals.

Mark Twain’s Late Animal Tales: Sentimental Anthropomorphism as Anthropocene Critique

2025-03-28T09:46:08+00:00

This article rereads two of Mark Twain’s late and most explicitly political but understudied texts involving non-human animals, the short story “A Dog’s Tale” (1903) and the novella A Horse’s Tale (1906), within an Anthropocene context. Although the texts came into existence long before the notion of the Anthropocene was around, the article argues that Twain’s sentimental anthropomorphism has relevance as Anthropocene critique and offers models for alternative narratives of the Anthropocene. After briefly introducing relevant historical and conceptual contexts, my analysis focuses on two specific facets of Twain’s narrative technique, spotlighting its potential as Anthropocene critique and for Anthropocene storytelling. On the one hand, the article shows that Twain’s sentimental anthropomorphism resonates with the Anthropocene by rescaling the imagination through its anthropomorphized people and arguing for an alternative, collective ethics of care that transcends species boundaries. On the other hand, I demonstrate how Twain’s technique allows for rethinking and troubling the caesurae of species and race as arbitrary constructions, which interlinks with recognizing the Anthropocene as (also) a racial process.

Beyond Anthropocentrism: Interspecies Collaboration and Survival in Rebecca Yarros’ Empyrean Series

2025-03-28T09:52:22+00:00

This paper examines Rebecca Yarros’ Empyrean series, focusing on the human-dragon bond as a posthumanist response to the consequences of the Anthropocene, symbolised in the text by the venins. Through the lens of ecocriticism and critical posthumanism, the article explores the connection between the protagonist, Violet Sorrengail, and her dragon, Tairn, which challenges traditional anthropocentric hierarchies by emphasising interspecies cooperation. The narrative’s engagement with themes of mutual dependence, agency, and survival reflects on the broader implications of posthumanist alliances to resist ecological degradation. Hence, this paper aims to contribute to discussions on the environmental crisis, highlighting the need for collaborative, multi-species solutions in the face of the Anthropocene’s destructive impact.

Pioneering Animal Justice: Emarel Freshel and the Millennium Guild (1865-1948)

2025-03-28T10:01:47+00:00

In the first half of twentieth-century North America, Emarel Freshel founded and directed the Millennium Guild, an organization which embraced opposition to every single form of cruelty to animals: a strong stance against vivisection for moral reasons, rejection of the promotion of humane slaughtering of animals as a way to prevent cruelty, vegetarianism as the only consistent way to defend animals, and opposition to zoos, to furs, to the use of animals in films, or any other form of animal exploitation, be it financial or to satisfy our desires and whims. Although she is best known for her vegetarian recipe book The Golden Rule Cookbook. 600 recipes for meatless dishes published in 1907 as Maude Russell Lorraine
Sharpe, where she advanced the position regarding vegetarianism that she would later advocate, her defense of animals covered every aspect of cruelty. Emarel Freshel’s defense of justice for animals paved the way for future abolitionists.

“Black Fish, BlackFish, What do you See?” Looking at the Faces of Orcas in Animal Advocacy Documentary Film

2025-03-28T10:09:49+00:00

Animal advocacy documentaries have, in the last decades, established themselves as an identifiable subgenre of their own with strategic conventions such as featuring the gaze of the nonhuman animal “looking back” for moral shock and ethical purposes. This article examines the problematic gaze and face of a particular species, the orca, with regards to such convention, and sets out to analyze how Gabriela Cowperthwaite’s Blackfish (2013) and William Neal’s Long Gone Wild (2019) deal with the representation of orca faces, gazes, and bodies within their wider structural dichotomy of captivity and wilderness. To do so, the article first explores representations of orcas in fictional films and how they are connected to the wider context of the marine park industry. It then turns to the issue of facial representation and the image of interspecies bonding in the documentaries, and points out the editing strategies that determine the central role of the films’ interviewees as guides in
the meaning-making process of orca faces and bodies.

Of National Dignity: The Ethics of Care in Jim Wooten’s We Are All the Same (2005)

2025-03-28T10:16:51+00:00

South Africa’s battle with HIV/AIDS placed the country at the epicentre of the epidemic as the largest case study within the world. We Are All the Same (2005), a memoir on the life of infected child Nkosi Johnson, puts the spotlight on the interface between Thabo Mbeki’s AIDS denialism and the pressing need to challenge discriminatory attitudes in Post-Apartheid South Africa. In this paper I view the role of memoirs as mediators in conflict resolution, thereby giving people both the role of witness and access to realities of children living with HIV/AIDS. Thus, memoirs operate not only as stand-ins of national issues such as the preservation of constitutional rights or dignity in care but also as repositories of public knowledge that are accessible to others. My analysis will illustrate the themes of the ethics of care and national dignity in the face of the HIV/AIDS epidemic within Wooten’s memoir to speak out about the violations of children’s rights in the areas of health and education.

We Loved it All: A Memory of Life, by Lydia Millet

2025-03-28T10:49:04+00:00