The Animal Part
Human and Other Animals in the Poetic Imagination
- Contents
- Review Quotes
- Awards

Acknowledgments
Introduction. Imagining Animals
Part One. The Abject Animal
1. The Beast in Pain: Abjection and Aggression in Archilochus and William Carlos Williams
2. Destruction and Creation: The Work of Men and Animals in Gustave Flaubert, Gerald Manley Hopkins, and Ezra Pound
Part Two. Becoming Something Else
3. Beyond the Pale: Joining the Society of Animals in Aristophanes, Herman Melville, and Louis-Ferdinand Céline
4. Changing Bodies: Being and Becoming an Animal in Semonides, Ovid, and H. P. Lovecraft
Epilogue. I Do Not Know What It Is I Am Like
References
Index
“Mark Payne has crafted a durable, thoughtful, short book, one that those interested in the writers he views should amble, swim, hike, or navigate a long way in order to read.”
“Eclectic and intriguing, The Animal Part urges us to take seriously literary works that create imaginative identifications of staged encounters with the nonhuman world. Considerations of human relations to animals could not be more timely, and Mark Payne adds a powerful and original voice to the discussion.”
“The Animal Part is like a conversation with a learned and perceptive friend. In a very original manner, Mark Payne contemplates human beings’ engagement with their own status as animals among other animals and considers the ways in which poetry enables a privileged access to an imaginative, imaginary inhabiting of the species being of others. I enjoyed this moving and powerful meditative essay on human being immensely.”
“A fascinating and very well-written book on aspects of representations of animal/human relations that have been little studied.”
Center for Robert Penn Warren Studies: Warren-Brooks Award
Won
Literature and Literary Criticism: General Criticism and Critical Theory
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