Allegory and animals in Olive Schreiner’s Undine : A Queer Little Child (1929)

Written and abandoned in the 1870s, and published posthumously in 1929, Undine: A Queer Little Child has remained on the margins of Olive Schreiner (1855-1920) studies, repeatedly dismissed as a juvenile and poor antecedent to The Story of An African Farm (1883), or deemed valuable primarily for its autobiographical content. This article redresses these schematic readings by analysing how Schreiner draws on allegorical forms in order to explore aspects of her burgeoning radicalism. Focusing on one of the main allegorical thrusts of the novel, provided by the zoomorphic and anthropomorphic animal characters that descend from mythical, fairytale, and Ancient Greek philosophical origins, it investigates how the protagonist’s metaphorically significant associations with animals relate to freethinking, feminist, and anti-imperialist ideas introduced by the novel. Undine thus undermines dominant nineteenth-century models of the “primitive” human or animal as less evolutionarily developed and without political platform, which can be seen to be a liberating move when the novel is read in dialogue with Jacques Derrida’s lectures on animals, and with other recent work in postcolonial ecocriticism

Out of Breath: Respiratory Aesthetics from Ruskin to Vernon Lee

This chapter examines the roles played by respiration—as physiological process, and embodied response—in the development of aesthetic theories at the end of the nineteenth century, traced from Ruskin to Vernon Lee. Late nineteenth-century attempts to define aesthetic experience in terms of its attendant physiological reactions still drew on breath’s immaterial poetic associations (air, wind and spirit) while being alert to the way respiratory control shifts easily between voluntary and involuntary modes of experience (will/automation). Lee’s idea of aesthetic experience envisages a complex, perhaps mystifying, action of involvement with works of art, dependent upon physiological, sensorimotor and respiratory movement. Exploring her understanding of empathetic identification, and relating it to current models of enactive cognition, the chapter recovers an entangled art and science of breath in nineteenth-century aesthetic theory