‘Victorians and Animal Welfare: The Transnational Network in Literature, Culture and Intellectual Thought ’
The Victorian era in general viewed animals not as mere property or utility, but as thinking, feeling subjects worthy of inclusion within a political community. It is increasingly in this light that the nineteenth-century British animal welfare movement and animal characters in Victorian literature are now being re-examined. Rather than regarding the literary sphere as a means of generating static influence over human attitudes towards animals, the deliberations at this colloquium shall seek to prove that it may be regarded as a repository of resources open to uses in the ongoing animal rights movement of the later nineteenth century in Britain and as the stepping stones to deeper ecological consciousness of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.