Authors
David Herman
Publication date
2020
Book
The Palgrave Handbook of Animals and Literature
Pages
51-64
Description
This chapter uses two works-Paula Fox’s novel Desperate Characters (1970) and Alice Munro’s short story “Boys and Girls” (1964)to consider how ideas from narrative studies can both inform and be informed by research on human-animal relationships. Although they employ very different narrative designs, both Fox and Munro use the resources of fiction to model how stories of the selfwhat social psychologists call “self-narratives”-need to be reframed within a widened, cross-species conception of self-other relations. The two case studies thus suggest how any number of narrational modes can be used to explore the possibilities and limitations of self-narratives in a more-than-human world.
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