Examines the function of animals and animal representations in four classic narratives: "Robinson Crusoe", "Gulliver's Travels", "Frankenstein" and "Moby-Dick". This title explores how these stories have been re-worked, in ways that reflect shifting social and environmental forces, by later novelists.

What Animals Mean in the Fiction of Modernity argues that nonhuman animals, and stories about them, have always been closely bound up with the conceptual and material work of modernity.

In the first half of the book, Philip Armstrong examines the function of animals and animal representations in four classic narratives: Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver's Travels, Frankenstein and Moby-Dick. He then goes on to explore how these stories have been re-worked, in ways that reflect shifting social and environmental forces, by later novelists,...