Animal Perception and Literary Language (Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature)

Animal Perception and Literary Language shows that the perceptual content of reading and writing derives from our embodied minds. Donald Wesling considers how humans, evolved from animals, have learned to code perception of movement into sentences and scenes. The book first specifies terms and questions in animal philosophy and surveys recent work on perception, then describes attributes of multispecies thinking and defines a tradition of writers in this lineage. Finally, the text concludes with literature coming into full focus in twelve case studies of varied readings. Overall, Wesling's book offers not a new method of literary criticism, but a reveal of what we all do with perceptual content when we read.

Donald Wesling is Professor Emeritus of English Literature at UC San Diego, USA. He has published on Wordsworth, John Muir, Edward Dorn, and Bakhtin; on rhyme, meter, and avant-garde prosody; and on how voice and emotion get into writing.