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The Hunter And The Hunted: Kipling's Challenge To Human Exceptionalism In "The White Seal" And "Quiquern", Jessica Marie Robbins

All ETDs from UAB

Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Books are some of the most well-known stories about nonhuman animals from the Victorian period, but rarely have scholars discussed this text without privileging the Mowgli stories or Kipling’s well-known colonialist alignments. In this thesis, I have challenged this scholarly tendency, showing how Kipling has paid careful attention to his nonhuman characters and given them characteristics that model the most current scientific information available at the time. My thesis argues that two of Kipling’s stories in particular, “The White Seal” and “Quiquern,” challenge the notion of human exceptionalism and force readers to confront the unsettling parallels …