Animals in the mirror of anthropomorphism in Richard Adams’ Watership down and Amitav Gosh’s The Hungry Tide

Abstract EN

Writers have long used animals to promote favored morals and values.

The depiction of animals in literature renders these nonhumans to social actors enhancing a narrative viewpoint.

This appropriation between humans and nonhuman behaviors is mostly achieved through anthropomorphism, the interpretation of non-human features and events in terms of human characteristics.

The relationship between humans and animals has been evolved in literature.

There’s quite a variance between earlier literature and more modern works.

The past few decades have witnessed a dramatic shift in the way the relationship between humans and animals is demonstrated in modern fiction.

Novels that were composed during the second half of the last century frequently displayed fantastically hybrid creatures that owned such exclusive human abilities as linguistic expression and philosophical thought.

This is observed in Richard Adams’ Watership Down, in which wild rabbits have not only linguistic capabilities, but also culture and mythology.

As the distance between the cultural world and the natural world increased- with the advance of technology, and environmental degradation- during the 2000s, authors desired to move beyond anthropomorphism and imagine the animal standing for itself, without representing or symbolizing humans.

Animals were compared to humans.

This is reflected in Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide, which introduces the Sundarbans as a living entity, where animals stand as rivals to humans.

The current research aims at introducing anthropomorphism.

It endeavors to investigate the evolvement of animals in the mirror of anthropomorphism in the last decades of twentieth century and contemporary literature via portraying the way animals are depicted in Richard Adams’ Watership Down (1972), and Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide (2004).

The study acknowledges that the dramatic advance in exposing animal capabilities is seen in the mirror of anthropomorphism, which is a standard for depicting what is wrong with the human condition.