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

“公牛和母牛”：维多利亚时代英国的牛，1837-1901 年

• 批准号: 2786923
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: University of Reading
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: Studentship
• 财政年份: 2023
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2023 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=studentship-2786923
• 关键词: bull; cow; bovine; Victorian; Britain

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?

这个项目探索了整个维多利亚时期牛的代表性。通过处理经典文学作品以及食谱、报纸、小册子和视觉艺术，这个项目涉及维多利亚人与牛互动、思考并赋予牛虚构形式的复杂、多重重音的方式。在城市化、人口增长和帝国主义扩张的时代，我将展示这些动物如何在维多利亚时代的文学、文化和社会中扮演着重要的角色--尽管有时并不引人注目，也没有得到足够的承认--无论它们被视为肉类、牛奶、奇观、同伴、殖民者，甚至是神。我的项目还将探索如何将维多利亚时代的意义带到今天对牛的概念化和对待上。我的研究解决了维多利亚时代动物学术上的一个空白。正如Theresa Mangum所阐述的那样，研究人员对“生活在他们身边的动物，如宠物”和“生活在非洲和印度的外来野生动物，生活在最远的地方的故事”感兴趣(174)。然而，对维多利亚时代和牛群的实质性、专著长度的文学分析尚未完成。现有的为数不多的研究是篇幅较长的，并探索有限类型的互动。两部杰出的作品是Harriet Ritvo的《牛肉男爵》和Liam Young的《新旧牛肉》：Ritvo探讨了维多利亚时期绅士对动物的迷恋现象，这种做法将动物生活变成了奇观和玩具；Young分析了人们体验牛肉的方式的变化，认为更好的卫生和动物待遇运动的效果是“消费者看不见动物的生和死”(45)。埃里卡·福吉的《当牛是什么感觉？》有一个更多的理论重点，看尼采，哈拉韦，和德普雷特，并提供了“它的故事”的想法(268)。动物作为代理人的恢复是我论文中的一个关键概念。我的项目将致力于阐明牛对维多利亚研究的意义，其特别关注的是小说赋予牛形式的方式。虽然牛通常是一个明显的边缘问题，但在许多流行的小说中，牛仍然潜伏着。在一段时间里，廉价出版手段的兴起，识字率的提高，以及连载的繁荣，阅读公众的规模显著扩大。这个项目希望通过揭示牛的存在来重新审视一系列小说，其中许多是阅读广泛、商业上成功的小说。看看《雾都孤儿》、《雪莉》和《弗洛斯河上的磨坊》等小说，这个项目就能思考维多利亚时代的人是如何消费和与以牛为主角的媒体互动的。本文通过对小说形式的考察，探究维多利亚时期的小说如何表现牛。在史密斯菲尔德肉类市场走出公众视野的那段时间里，这种小说形式有没有以任何方式效仿？牛的生活呈现出来的是“真实的”吗？这个项目考察了小说形式如何美化或消除动物的痛苦，和/或呈现一幅浪漫的牛生活肖像。它感兴趣的是维多利亚时代的小说形式如何塑造了读者的态度。它还着眼于维多利亚人和牛之间互动的实质性，以及它们如何象征性地与包括阶级、性别、国家和帝国在内的人类话语对话。这个项目还强调了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人和我们自己之间的这些连接点，详细描述了人和牛之间以人类为中心的跨物种互动如何导致空气和水污染，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，这篇论文提出的问题是，我们如何才能实现新的互动，维多利亚时代的人能否为我们提供任何解决方案？