Abstract
This chapter examines Gothic elements in Richard Adams’s The Plague Dogs, focusing on the manifold ways in which the uncanny links to the animal other. The chapter explores how Adams’s talking animal story harnesses what Gamer calls the ‘protean’ propensities of the Gothic to an animal rights agenda. Höing shows that The Plague Dogs deconstructs the Gothic animal as a mere screen to project human anxieties on, while the novel also utilises Gothic motifs to foreground the real-life animal. The Plague Dogs, so Höing argues, ultimately employs a method of what Goddu terms ‘haunting back’ in order to unmask the danger inherent to reading a real-life animal as a reflection of human fears. In doing so, the novel invites reflections on both the Gothic mode as such and the status of companion animals in an anthropocentric world.
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Höing, A. (2020). Devouring the Animal Within: Uncanny Otherness in Richard Adams’s The Plague Dogs. In: Heholt, R., Edmundson, M. (eds) Gothic Animals. Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34540-2_4
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