Genre, tradition and renewal: Animal autobiography and poetics of the multicentric self

Abstract The development of animal autobiography as a genre has been constrained by the narrative possibility and epistemological impossibility animals autobiographers. In spite its limitations, still developed into different generic forms. Noting tradition renewal well ethical ramifications in autobiography, this study examines how selfhood is constructed to render varieties autobiographical experiences. Drawn upon autofiction/autobiography studies literary studies, article probes art self-invention autobiography. A “self”-oriented analysis Dorothy Kilner’s Life Perambulations Mouse (1784) Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty (1877) reveals genre’s common representational strategies, such multi-scaled perceptions an autofictional self, critical anthropomorphism ethics witness. Based on these it further Katherine Applegate’s One Only Ivan (2012) endorses continuum renewal. Following Jacques Derrida’s key concepts his lecture “The Animal that Therefore I Am” discourse human–animal relations, concludes with proposed poetics multicentric self which maps out interplay first-person persona’s authenticity, autofiction authority, serves increasingly prominent anti-anthropocentric purposes.