TY  - JOUR
A1  - Middelhoff, Frederike
T1  - Literary autozoographies: contextualizing species life in german animal autobiography
JF  - Humanities
N2  - What does it mean to take animal autobiography seriously and how can we account for the representation of life-narrating animals? The article investigates animal autobiographies as ‘literary autozoographies’, drawing attention to both the generic contexts and the epistemological premises of these texts. Adopting a double-bind approach stemming from autobiographical research as well as cultural animal studies, the article focuses on early nineteenth-century equine autozoographies from the German-speaking tradition. These texts are discussed exemplarily in relation to the parameters of fictional autobiographies, before they are contextualized with historical discourses regarding horses in natural history and so-called ‘horse-science’. Due to the fact that the poetics and aesthetics of the genre are modeled on the templates of factual autobiographies, the article argues that literary autozoographies can be read as fictional autobiographies as well as meta-auto/biographical discourse undermining autobiographical conventions. Furthermore, it shows that literary autozoography and zoology share a common historical and ideological epistemology accounting for the representation of animals in both fields. Literary autozoographies thus participate in the negotiation and production of species-specific knowledge. Reading Life of the Mecklenburg Mare Amante (1804), Life of a Job Horse (1807) and Life of a Worn-Out Hack (1819) alongside equine-centric discourses around 1800, the article demonstrates in what ways these texts can be regarded as part of a regime of knowledge attributing emotions and cognitive capacities to horses, while simultaneously arguing for humane treatment on the basis of interspecies homologies.
KW  - animal autobiography
KW  - fictional autobiography
KW  - meta-autobiography
KW  - life writing
KW  - contextualist narratology
KW  - cultural and literary animal studies
KW  - poetics of knowledge
KW  - zoology
KW  - natural history
KW  - equine autozoography
KW  - horse-science
Y1  - 2017
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-198052
SN  - 2076-0787
VL  - 6
IS  - 2
PB  - MDPI
ER  - 
TY  - CHAP
A1  - Middelhoff, Frederike
T1  - (Not) Speaking for Animals and the Environment: Zoopoetics and Ecopoetics in Yoko Tawada’s Memoirs of a Polar Bear
T2  - Texts, Animals, Environments: Zoopoetics and Ecopoetics
N2  - No abstract available.
KW  - Animal Studies
KW  - Cultural Animal Studies
KW  - Cultural Studies
KW  - Ecocriticism
KW  - Environmental Humanities
KW  - Human-Animal Studies
KW  - Literary Studies
Y1  - 2019
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-178142
UR  - https://www.rombach-verlag.de/buecher/suchergebnis/rombach/buch/details/texts-animals-environments.html
PB  - Rombach Druck- und Verlagshaus
CY  - Freiburg i. Br.
ER  - 
TY  - CHAP
A1  - Middelhoff, Frederike
A1  - Schönbeck, Sebastian
T1  - Coming to Terms: The Poetics of More-than-human Worlds
T2  - Texts, Animals, Environments: Zoopoetics and Ecopoetics
N2  - No abstract available.
KW  - Animal Studies
KW  - Cultural Animal Studies
KW  - Cultural Studies
KW  - Ecocriticism
KW  - Environmental Humanities
KW  - Human-Animal Studies
KW  - Literary Studies
Y1  - 2019
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-177783
UR  - https://www.rombach-verlag.de/buecher/suchergebnis/rombach/buch/details/texts-animals-environments.html
PB  - Rombach Druck- und Verlagshaus
CY  - Freiburg i. Br.
ER  -