Canine Death in Canonical American Fiction

This book investigates the death and suffering of domestic dogs that occurs on the peripheries of classic American novels and complicates the reductive and overly simplistic portrayal of these animals as "man's best friend." These scenes are jarringly underrepresented in literary criticism yet overrepresented in well-read fiction. This book looks at the wealth of human-dog relations that the archive currently does not address by juxtaposing sentimental dog novels with a variety of other genres that include dogs more sparingly. The author explores masculine and feminine coming-of-age narratives as well as naturalist and postmodern novels. The work reads texts and other forms of media through the prism of animal studies, critical race theory, gender studies, and ecocriticism in conversation with more customary literary emphases on genre, motif, focalization, and symbolism to investigate the pattern of literary reliance on dogs as both outlets and scapegoats for human violence. The arguments challenge the forced and increasing dependence of canines on humans as well as the inevitability of their sacrifice in the construction of narratives. Thus, a core theme of my project is the interrogation of authorial reliance on dog death as merely instrumental to human self-realization and the production of cheap sentiment. Finally, it contributes to environmental humanities and animal studies by coining new keywords for critical analysis that expand the parameters by which classic novels can be interpreted and shift the focus from animal characters as peripheral devices to essential literary features.