Between Human and Animal

The traditional way of representing animals was either by a metaphor or by anthropomorphization. In parallel with the slowly growing ecological sensitivity of our times, in contemporary literature, animals are depicted as specific subjects. The study surveys a selection of representative works from world literature and groups them into thematic, motivic groups, tracking the route of animal motifs from the Antiquity to the present, with special focus on a set of Hungarian literary works that deserve a place in the “animal canon” of world literature. The survey is aimed at providing the background against which two contemporary Hungarian novels, Zsolt Láng’s Bestiarium Transylvaniae IV and Zsuzsa Selyem’s Moszkvában esik [It’s Raining in Moscow] will be discussed. These novels organically grow out of, but also displace, the outlined literary tradition, basing their aesthetics upon the subversive perceptual, narrative potential of the animal subject.