The Animal Novel

Authors

  • Mario Ortiz-Robles University of Wisconsin-Madison

Abstract

Our reluctance to take seriously the anthropomorphic terms we routinely employ to describe the novel’s history, form, and social function has prevented us from considering critically the constitutive role of animals in the genesis and development of the genre. In this paper I argue that the figure of the animal, which subtends the biopolitical logic of realism, is our best, perhaps our only, means of coming to terms with anthropogenic extinction.

Author Biography

  • Mario Ortiz-Robles, University of Wisconsin-Madison

    Mario Ortiz-Robles is Mellon-Morgridge Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of The Novel as Event (2010), Literature and Animal Studies (2016) and co-editor of Narrative Middles (2011). He is currently at work on a book-length project on the narrative treatment of the figure of the animal in fiction written before and after Darwin as a way of tracking the status of the natural in nineteenth-century European culture.

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Published

2026-05-04

Issue

Vol. 31 No. 1 (2018): Animal Studies

Section

Main Section

License

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

How to Cite

Ortiz-Robles, M. (2026). The Animal Novel. FRAME, Journal of Literary Studies, 31(1), 11-27. https://platform.openjournals.nl/FRAME/article/view/27323