Learning, Liberation, and Posthumanism in The Wind on the Moon

Abstract The Wind on the Moon (1944) is a children’s novel by Eric Linklater, in which two nonhuman characters, a puma and a falcon, play a substantial role as friends, teachers and expert aids to the girl protagonists. In this article I argue that these nonhuman characters in The Wind on the Moon take a posthumanist stance, and that they are able to do so due to the traditional and perhaps underestimated presence of animals in children’s literature. Their message of anti-anthropocentrism and bioegalitarianism gains further importance due to the novel’s ubiquitous engagement with the motifs of learning and liberation. While learning can be said to be part of the general didactic discourse of most children’s books, the strong liberation motif—especially when zoo animals are textually associated with prisoners of war—expresses a serious posthumanist critique which also suggests that there is more to learn from animal characters in children’s literature than has often been supposed.