Animal Speech and Perceptions of Threat in Human-Animal Narratives from Kipling (1894) to Kivirähk (2007)

This thesis argues that non-human animal speech in fiction can be used to promote a range of conflicting agendas in relation to social and interspecies hierarchies. In Chapter One, I analyse Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Books and Kenneth Grahame’s Wind in the Willows to demonstrate how animal speech can be used in fiction to celebrate colonial and class-based hierarchies. Contrastingly, in Chapter Two, I argue that Andrus Kivirähk’s The Man Who Spoke Snakish and Salman Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories present more-than-human speech and language as a form of resistance against colonialist oppression of humans, of non-humans and of language. In Chapter Three, I argue that Barbara Gowdy’s The White Bone and Timothy Findley’s Not Wanted on the Voyage use animal speech and language to challenge anthropocentric and heteropatriarchal narratives. In this final chapter, I also interrogate the relationship between narratives of extinction and conservation, both in these texts and in current postcolonial debates.

As well as literary animal studies, this research contributes to the study of linguistic animacy by examining the relationship between animacy and anthropomorphism in literary narratives. It also contributes to the interdisciplinary field of extinction studies, analysing the relationship between biological and linguistic extinction in the texts under discussion and engaging with contemporary debates in the study of language extinction and linguistic oppression. I also contribute to the field of biosemiotics, by interrogating the potential of biotranslation to function as a tool for constructing non-human narratives.