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

这个项目探讨了整个维多利亚时期的牛的代表性。通过处理规范的文学作品以及烹饪书，报纸，小册子和视觉艺术，这个项目与复杂的，多重音的方式，其中的伊特鲁里亚人互动，思考，并给予虚构的形式牛。在城市化、人口增长和帝国主义扩张的时代，我将展示这些动物是如何在维多利亚文学、文化和社会中发挥重要作用的--尽管有时并不引人注目，也未得到充分承认--它们是否被视为肉、奶、景观、伴侣、殖民代理人，甚至是神。我的项目还将探讨如何将这种维多利亚时代的意义可能会带来承担后，今天的概念化和治疗牛。我的研究填补了维多利亚时代动物研究的空白。正如Theresa Mangum所阐述的那样，研究人员已经与维多利亚时代的兴趣进行了“关于生活在离他们最近的动物的叙述，比如宠物”，以及“关于非洲和印度生活在最远的异国野生动物的叙述”（174）。然而，一个实质性的，专着长度的文学分析的马和牛尚未完成。现有的少数研究只有一章的篇幅，并探讨了有限类型的互动。两部杰出的作品是哈里特·里特沃的《牛肉的男爵》和利亚姆·扬的《新旧牛肉》：里特沃探讨了维多利亚时代贵族对动物的迷恋，这种行为使动物生活成为奇观和玩物;杨分析了牛肉的变化方式，认为改善卫生和动物待遇的运动具有使“消费者看不到动物的生死”的效果（45）。埃里卡福吉的“当一头牛是什么感觉？有一个更多的理论重点，看着尼采，哈拉维，德普雷，并提供了“它的故事”的想法（268）。这种动物作为代理人的恢复是我论文中的一个关键概念。我的项目将致力于明确牛对维多利亚研究的重要性，其特别关注的福尔斯是小说赋予牛形式的方式。虽然牛通常是一个明显的外围关注，但在许多流行小说中仍然潜伏着。在这段时间里，廉价的出版方式兴起，识字率提高，连载热潮兴起，阅读的公众显著扩大。这个项目旨在重新审视一系列的小说，许多阅读和商业上的成功，通过闪耀在牛的存在光。通过研究《奥利弗·特维斯特》、《雪莉》和《弗洛斯河上的磨坊》等小说，本项目可以考虑印第安人如何消费和与以牛为特色的媒体互动。本文从小说的形式入手，探讨维多利亚时期的小说是如何表现牛的。在史密斯菲尔德肉类市场淡出公众视线的时期，小说形式是否以任何方式效仿？牛的生活是真实呈现的吗？这个项目探讨了小说的形式如何净化或省略动物的痛苦，和/或呈现一幅浪漫化的牛的生活肖像。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。它还着眼于人类和牛之间互动的物质性，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世纪世纪社会分享和放大维多利亚时代与牛的互动的方式。该项目强调了人类与我们之间的这些联系点，详细说明了人与牛之间的跨物种相互作用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。面对这些基本的威胁，本论文问我们如何才能朝着一个新的互动，以及是否有美国人可以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?