ANIMAL PRESENCE AND HUMAN IDENTITY IN MODERN LITERATURE explores literary representations of the human-animal encounter in modernity that press human "being" to its limits. This project arises within the question, "Can an animal die?," formulated in response to Martin Heidegger''s famous assertion that, properly speaking, animals cannot "die" but can only "perish," an assertion that sharply summarizes western "humanist" philosophical discourse--particularly as etched in the "modern turn" initiated by Descartes--in which the "human" emerges precisely as that (non)animal which enjoys a distinctive relation to both the inner essence and outer edge of existence. Recently--most notably in the late works of Giorgio Agamben, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva, and Emmanuel Levinas--philosophers have interrogated the grounds of Heidegger''s formulation, putting into question its assumption of unnavigable distance and un-negotiable difference between humans and (other) animals, drawing partly on Darwinian conceptions of a biologistic continuum among creatures, partly on ethological revelations of animal "capacities," and partly on ideas intrinsic to philosophy itself, such as a demystification of binarism as an instrument of philosophical structure and analysis. The emergence of "the question of the animal" among a wide number of thinkers, from poststructuralists and anti-foundationalists to practitioners of ecocriticism, feminism, and posthumanism, has both shaken and enlivened contemporary philosophical inquiry, providing fresh vocabularies for reconsidering fundamental questions of social, psychological, and ethical meaning, as well as new means for addressing concrete problems in creaturely and planetary welfare. Thus, admitting the possibility of animal death shifts the very ground upon which humans and animals encounter each other, potentially transforming the very idea of "being" across the conventional human-animal divide.This current emergence of philosophical consideration of what I will term "humanimality" is a salutary development for what Michel Foucault called the "human sciences," and this volume will draw from, as well as itself further interrogate, this evolving discourse. However, proceeding from the broad proposition that philosophy "proper" does not enjoy an exclusive capacity for probing "philosophical" concerns, Animal Presence and Human Identity in Modern Literature will explore a sequence of Anglo-American literary texts that have, with equal insistence but through different expressive and formal means, constituted a collateral investigation of the reciprocal composition of "human" and "animal" identity in modernity. Indeed, the book''s overarching thesis is that, taken together, these texts--including Shakespeare''s King Lear; Eliot''s Middlemarch; Wells''s The Island of Doctor Moreau; Atwood''s Surfacing; and Desai''s Clear Light of Day--are both distinctive in their figurations of the human-animal relation and representative of a wide spectrum of literary instantiations of the "question of the animal" for post-Enlightenment western culture.

This de facto tradition of literary critical animal inquiry troubles the organizing suppositions of authoritative philosophical and cultural thought about the human/animal divide, probing forms of "humanimality" that disturb and reimagine prevailing figurations of key constructs--mind; sensation; desire; death; justice; sovereignty; expression--through which the "human" has been variously established, scrutinized, assailed, completed, and celebrated, both as an end-in-itself and as an instrument of specific cultural projects (such as the delimitation of citizenship, the establishment of nation, the building of empire, the advancement of science, the delineation of "moral community," and the general cultivation of public and private spheres). In particular, these texts--often set at the literal edge of the culturally familiar (bare heaths; high cliffs; wild woods; demilitarized zones; isolated dwellings; unmapped islands; national boundary-lines)--offer striking scenes of encounter wherein the human confronts the animal in forms that are by turns singular, opaque, alluring, ominous, and demanding, stirring forms of ambivalence that provoke profound, sometimes shattering, challenges to prevailing ideals of self and other, life and death . of Being as such. Taken together, these texts not only supplement the philosophical tradition but also challenge it with a haunting question: what happens when modernity''s story of human exceptionalism is interrupted by the animal roar on the other side of silence (to borrow an image from George Eliot''s Middlemarch)--a collapse of the humanist project or a regenerative, if anguished, opportunity for what Levinas called "ethics as first philosophy"? Working within and alongside the works assembled from Shakespeare to Desai, Animal Presence and Human Identity in Modern Literature confronts this question as it variously animates our still-evolving modernity.