Animal Visions

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-viii

   PDF

2. Introduction: Emplaced Readerly Devotions

   • Susan Mary Pyke

   Pages 1-103

3. Artful Dream Writing into the Roots

   • Susan Mary Pyke

   Pages 105-160

4. Ghosts: Of Writing, at Windows, in Mirrors, on Moors

   • Susan Mary Pyke

   Pages 161-194

5. Moor Loving

   • Susan Mary Pyke

   Pages 195-234

6. Respecting and Trusting the Beast

   • Susan Mary Pyke

   Pages 235-266

7. Animal Grace

   • Susan Mary Pyke

   Pages 267-285

8. Back Matter

   Pages 287-314

   PDF

Animal Visions considers how literature responds to the harms of anthropocentricism, working with Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847) and various adaptations of this canonistic novel to show how posthumanist dream writing unsettles the privileging of the human species over other species. Two feminist and post-Freudian responses, Kathy Acker’s poem “Obsession” (1992) and Anne Carson’s “The Glass Essay” (1997) most strongly extend Brontë’s dream writing in this direction. Building on the trope of a ludic Cathy ghost who refuses the containment of logic and reason, these and other adaptations offer the gift of a radical peri-hysteria. This emotional excess is most clearly seen in Kate Bush’s music video “Wuthering Heights” (1978) and Peter Kosminsky’s film Wuthering Heights (1992). Such disturbances make space for a moor love that is particularly evident in Jane Urquhart’s novel Changing Heaven (1989) and, to a lesser extent Sylvia Plath’s poem, “Wuthering Heights” (1961). Brontë’s Wuthering Heights  and its most productive afterings make space for co-affective relations between humans and other animal beings. Andrea Arnold’s film Wuthering Heights (2011) and Luis Buñuel’s Abismos de Pasión (1954) also highlight the rupturing split gaze of non-acting animals in their films. In all of these works depictions of intra-active and entangled responses between animals show the potential for dynamic and generative multispecies relations, where the human is one animal amongst the kin of the world.

• Wuthering Heights
• Emily Brontë
• Environment
• Nonhuman
• Human
• British and Irish Literature

• School of Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Australia

  Susan Mary Pyke

Susan Mary Pyke teaches creative writing, literary criticism and environmental studies at the University of Melbourne, Australia. She writes articles and essays in the shared fields of animal studies, literary criticism and ecocriticism, as well as fiction and poetry. 

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