Intimate Strangers: Regionalism and the Construction of Nonhuman Subjectivities in Mary E. Wilkins Freeman's Animal Fiction

Abstract: What is the role of genre in the fictional representation of animals? Mary E. Wilkins Freeman's collection Understudies (1901) demonstrates how regionalist conventions are extended into nonhuman domains. Understudies attempts to do for nonhuman creatures what regionalist writers had long done for marginalized human groups: nudge them into the circle of social and moral concern by demonstrating their kinship with "us" while preserving a modicum of untranslatability that allows them to retain their integrity and independent value as "other." By bringing genre studies to bear on historicist explorations of animal representation, this essay demonstrates how form shapes the literary depiction of human and nonhuman subjects alike.