Narrative Strategies Giving Voice to the Silenced Subject
The Horse in Fiction for Children
Abstract
This article uses an ecocritical, posthumanist animal studies approach to fiction about horses for children and young adults in order to show how different narrative strategies co-exist within a framework of silence versus voice and Othering versus anthropomorphizing. The examples are taken from two Swedish series of books: the stories of Vitnos (1971–1980) by Marie Louise Rudolfsson, and those about Klara (1999–2008) by Pia Hagmar. The study shows that regardless of the narrative form chosen, be it placing the horse as a first-person narrator or introducing a human narrator and focalizer, the result is quite similar. The horse is alternately anthropomorphized and depicted as Other, many times through the technique of allomorphism, placing the horse above the human being.
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