About the Author

Elizabeth Young is Carl M. and Elsie A. Small Professor of English at Mount Holyoke College. She is the author of Black Frankenstein: The Making of an American Metaphor and Disarming the Nation: Women’s Writing and the American Civil War.

Reviews

“In this innovative and compelling study, Young . . . interweaves a first-person account of taking her golden retriever for cancer treatments with an exploration of the representation of animals in fiction and other cultural forms in 19th-century North America. Young uses Marshall Saunders’s best-selling novel Beautiful Joe (1894) as a touchstone to explore what she terms ‘first-dog voice’ used in fiction. Focusing on a technique she calls ‘literary taxidermy,’ the author explores a range of theoretical concerns that connect animal studies to discussions of race, gender, and national identity.”—R. D. Morrison Choice

“Pet Projects takes animal humanities research to new heights. Recovering the animal-advocacy stories of Canada’s first best-selling author, Margaret Marshall Saunders, Young also uses feminist personal criticism to frame a timely history of animal studies, one that calls out the desires of so many to invent the field, while at the same time identifying how its development has involved collaborative negotiations at the crossroads of disciplines.”—Susan McHugh, author of Love in a Time of Slaughters: Human-Animal Stories Against Genocide and Extinction

“Young characterizes Pet Projects as a ‘picaresque wandering’ in the fields of literary representation, animal studies, feminism, CanLit and American studies, and across intellectual, temporal, and geographical boundaries, and there is something rogue about her method. But if human relationships with other animals are to become more accommodating, more compassionate, less abusive, then a rogue approach—one that challenges conventional assumptions and methods of knowledge-making—is surely what is required.”—Catherine Parry American Literary History