Lauren Ianthe Cullen

Supervisor: Professor Kirsten Shepherd-Barr

Thesis Title: Beyond Sentimentality: Animal Characters in Nineteenth-Century Fiction

Research Interests: Animal Studies; Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture; Sensation Fiction; Animal Rights; Literature and Science; Literary Activism; Canadian Studies; Short Stories

Doctoral Research: My research is situated at the intersection of literature, animal studies, and the environmental humanities. In my doctoral thesis, Beyond Sentimentality: Animal Characters in Nineteenth-Century Fiction, I showed how thinking about animals challenges existing definitions of literary character in nineteenth-century British and Canadian fiction. Animal characters have been depicted chiefly as minor, disposable, and purely symbolic, especially within the folds of the English realist novel; thus, I looked to popular forms of fiction such as sensation and detective fiction, the realistic wild animal story, and the animal (auto)biography. In four chapters, my thesis examined how the expanded creative parameters of popular fiction inspired and enabled alternative animal depictions through analysis of the formal techniques, rhetorical structures, and narrative methods employed by writers. I argued that evolving discussions about animal intelligence, emotion, communication, and subjectivity were embedded within, explored, and refracted through nineteenth-century popular fiction narratives that reshaped representations of animal life and fostered a powerful new sense of animal-human relationships.