Animal Minds, Other Minds: Nonhuman Intelligence and Narrative Form in American Fiction (Cultural Frames, Framing Culture)

How a fascination with animal consciousness, perception, and intelligence shaped American fiction in the twentieth century Animal Minds, Other Minds upends a common assumption: that the minds encountered in fiction are always in some sense fundamentally human.Readers, writers, critics, and narrative theorists have surmised that when fiction turns its attention to the inner lives of its characters, it does so with the aim of revealing their recognizable humanity.This book tells a different story. The narrative styles of American fiction show a growing awareness that human subjectivity exists within a multispecies ecology of minds.The science of animal minds, argues Victoria Googasian, has played a central role in building fiction's capacity to imagine cognitive diversity, both within our own species and in the wider world of sentience. The multispecies world of twentieth-century American literature exhibits a clear recognition that intelligence can take more than one form.From the fragm