Fabulous Histories: Animals in Literature

In the context of global exploration and colonisation, Europeans were exposed to a dazzling range of previously unknown life-forms, and the friable boundary between humans and other creatures became a fruitful, and sometimes vexed, area of representation in the early novel. At home, as pet-keeping became notably fashionable, and an object of moral scrutiny, animal biographies and autobiographies made it possible to think of an animal’s point of view. New forms of didactic literature instructed children through delight, using story and talking animals to discourage cruelty and promote empathy. Meanwhile, the extent to which creatures from other species can ever be truly recognized and known by human beings was a significant subject in poetry. 

Aileen Douglas is Professor of Eighteenth-Century Studies at Trinity. Having studied English and History as an undergraduate at Trinity, she undertook postgraduate work in the United States. Her M.A. was awarded by the University of Delaware and her PhD by Princeton University. She taught at Washington University in St. Louis for several years before returning to the School of English at Trinity in 1993. A Fellow of TCD since 2000, she has served as Dean of Undergraduate Studies/Senior Lecturer (2008-11) and Head of the School of English (2016-9). Aileen was President of the Eighteenth-Century Ireland Society (2017-2022) and has given invited lectures in the United States, the U.K., France, Italy and Japan, among others.

Aileen’s research is particularly focussed on canon formation and the transmission of literary texts; issues of gender and writing by women; and the human body and literary representation. Her first monograph, Uneasy Sensations: Smollett and the Body (Chicago University Press), explored how the Scottish writer represented physical experience in his novels. More recently, Work in Hand: Script, Print, and Writing, 1690-1840 (Oxford University Press) examined the relationships between manual writing and print at a time of technological change. Currently, Aileen is working on a monograph, The Story of the Child, that examines when and why child characters began to appear in fiction in English.