Canine Death in Canonical American Fiction

Canine Death in Canonical American Fiction investigates the presence of dogs in literature through an analysis of classic and popular novels. The author interrogates the “man’s best friend” trope and questions its validity by turning to fiction as a telling source of cultural attitudes towards animals and questions why dog death, specifically, is such a pervasive trope in literature. From sentimental tearjerkers like Fred Gipson’s Old Yeller to canonical classics like Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, this book examines the wealth of human-dog relations that the literary archive does not currently address and complicates prevalent assumptions of this relationship as inherently altruistic and symbiotic. Amelia Labenski argues that dogs carry a heavy symbolic weight in and outside of literature, where they often function as moral alibis or romantic stand-ins for our other, more explicitly harmful, relationships with animals. These arguments bring to bear a useful discussion about the role fiction can play in how we re-envision our relationships with animals of all kinds and the environment which we all share.