'A bull and cow': the bovine in Victorian Britain, 1837-1901

这个项目探索了整个维多利亚时期牛的表现形式。通过处理经典文学作品、烹饪书、报纸、小册子和视觉艺术，该项目涉及维多利亚时代与牛互动、思考和赋予牛虚构形式的复杂、多口音的方式。在一个城市化、人口增长和帝国主义扩张的时代，我将展示这些动物是如何在维多利亚时代的文学、文化和社会中发挥重要作用的——如果有时不引人注目和不被承认——无论它们是被当作肉、牛奶、奇观、伴侣、殖民代理人，甚至是神。我的项目还将探讨维多利亚时代的意义如何影响当今对牛的概念化和处理。我的研究填补了维多利亚时代动物研究的空白。正如特蕾莎·曼格姆所阐述的那样，研究人员对维多利亚时代的兴趣是“关于生活在离他们最近的动物的叙述，比如宠物”，以及“关于生活在最远的非洲和印度的外来野生动物的叙述”（174）。然而，关于维多利亚时代和牛的实质性、专著长度的文学分析尚未完成。少数可用的研究是章节长度和探索有限类型的相互作用。两件著名的作品是哈里特·里特沃的《牛肉男爵》和利亚姆·杨的《新旧牛肉》：里特沃探讨了维多利亚时代贵族们对动物的幻想现象，这种现象把动物的生活变成了奇观和玩物；Young分析了牛肉生产方式的变化，认为改善卫生和动物待遇的运动使“消费者看不到动物的生死”（45）。艾丽卡·福吉的“当一头奶牛是什么感觉？”有一个更理论的焦点，看尼采，哈拉威和德斯普雷特，并提出了“它的故事”的想法（268）。这种动物作为代理的恢复是我论文的一个关键概念。我的项目将致力于弄清楚牛对维多利亚时代研究的重要性，其特别关注的是小说赋予牛的形式的方式。虽然牛经常是一个明显的次要问题，但在许多流行小说中仍然是潜在的。在一段时间里，廉价出版手段的兴起、识字率的提高和连载的繁荣，阅读公众显著扩大。这个项目希望通过揭示牛的存在，重新审视一系列小说，其中许多是广受欢迎和商业上成功的。通过阅读《雾都孤儿》、《雪莉》和《弗洛斯河上的磨坊》等小说，本项目可以考虑维多利亚时代的人是如何消费和与以牛为主题的媒体互动的。通过对小说形式的考察，本文探讨了维多利亚时代的小说是如何表现奶牛的。在史密斯菲尔德肉类市场淡出公众视线的时期，这种新颖的形式是否也会以某种方式跟进呢？牛的生命呈现得“真实”吗？这个项目探讨了这种新颖的形式如何淡化或忽略动物的痛苦，以及/或呈现牛生活的浪漫化肖像。它感兴趣的是维多利亚时代的小说形式如何塑造其读者的态度。它还着眼于维多利亚时代人和牛之间互动的物质性，以及它们如何象征性地与人类话语对话，包括阶级、性别、民族和帝国。该项目还强调了21世纪社会分享和放大维多利亚时代与牛的互动的方式。这个项目突出了维多利亚时代人和我们自己之间的这些联系，详细介绍了以人类为中心的人与牛之间的跨物种互动是如何导致空气和水污染的，并导致了我们现在所知的气候变化。面对这些根本性的威胁，本文提出了一个问题：我们如何才能朝着一种新的互动方式努力？维多利亚时代的人们能否为我们提供任何解决方案？

This project explores the representation of cattle throughout the Victorian period. By addressing canonical literary works as well as cookbooks, newspapers, pamphlets, and visual art, this project engages with the complex, multi-accentual ways in which the Victorians interacted with, thought about, and gave fictional form to cattle. At a time of urbanisation, population growth, and imperialist expansion, I will show how these animals played a significant - if at times unobtrusive and underacknowledged - role in Victorian literature, culture and society, whether they were treated as meat, milk, spectacle, companion, colonising agent, even deity. My project will also explore how this Victorian significance might be brought to bear upon the present-day conceptualisation and treatment of cattle. My research addresses a gap in Victorian animal scholarship. As Theresa Mangum expounds, researchers have engaged with Victorian interest in "narratives about animals that lived closest to them, like pets", and "narratives about the exotic wild animals of Africa and India that lived furthest away" (174). Yet a substantive, monograph-length literary analysis of the Victorians and cattle has yet to be completed. The few studies available are chapter-length and explore limited types of interaction. Two prominent works are Harriet Ritvo's 'Barons of Beef' and Liam Young's 'Old and New Beef': Ritvo explores the phenomenon of Victorian animal fancying among the gentry, a practice which rendered animal life into spectacle and plaything; Young analyses the shifting ways in which beef has been experienced, arguing that campaigns for better hygiene and animal treatment had the effect of making "animal lives and deaths invisible to consumers" (45). Erica Fudge's 'What was it like to be a cow?' has a more theoretical focus, looking at Nietzsche, Haraway, and Despret, and offering the idea of "itstory" (268). This recovering of the animal as agent is a key concept in my thesis. My project will work towards making clear the significance of cattle to Victorian Studies and its particular focus falls on the way in which the novel gave form to cattle. Though often an apparently peripheral concern, cattle remain latent in many popular fictions. During a period which saw the rise of cheaper means of publication, improved rates of literacy, and a boom in serialisation, reading publics expanded significantly. This project looks to re-examine a range of fictions, many well-read and commercially successful, by shining a light on the presence of the bovine. Looking at novels such as Oliver Twist, Shirley, and The Mill on the Floss, enables this project to consider how Victorians consumed and interacted with media that featured cattle. Examining the novel form, this thesis interrogates how the Victorian novel represents the cow. During a period which saw Smithfield meat market move out of the public eye, did the novel form follow suit in any way? Are bovine lives presented 'realistically?' This project examines how the novel form might sanitise, or elide, animal suffering, and/or present a romanticised portrait of bovine lives. It is interested in how the Victorian novel form shaped the attitudes of its readership. It also looks at the materiality of interactions between Victorians and cattle, as well as how they might symbolically speak to human discourses including class, gender, nation, and empire. This project also underscores the ways in which twenty-first century society shares, and magnifies, Victorian interactions with cattle. Highlighting these points of connection between Victorians and ourselves, this project details how anthropocentric cross-species interactions between people and cattle have led to air and water pollution and contributed to what we now know as climate change. Facing these fundamental threats, this thesis asks how might we work toward a new interaction, and whether the Victorians can offer us any solutions?