Elisha Cohn's research generally focuses on Victorian literature, but she's always been interested in animal studies, as well. There are dogs all over British fiction, she notes, often appearing as close companions to humans in works by Charles Dickens and George Eliot. Cohn, professor of literatures in English in the College of Arts and Sciences, has also written about Thomas Hardy's representation of animals in his books and his personal commitment to animal protection.
For her second book, "Milieu: A Creaturely Theory of the Contemporary Novel," which came out this April from Stanford University Press, Cohn focuses on contemporary authors and the explosion of animals as characters in their works. She also explores the methods authors are using to give these characters a voice and how they are being portrayed as important parts of the environment of a story.
"The barrier to including animals in serious literary fiction is gone," Cohn said. "I wanted to investigate how it vanished and what strategies novelists developed to surmount that barrier, to not take it in a merely sentimental direction."
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