Colonising the Nonhuman Other in Anne Haverty’s "One Day as a Tiger"

Authors

  • Vanesa Roldán Romero Universidad de Santiago de Compostela

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.37536/ECOZONA.2022.13.1.4319

Keywords:

Anne Haverty, Ecocriticism, Colonialism, Ireland, Nonhuman, Sheep

Abstract

The rise of new ethical anxieties in the interaction between humans a nonhumans alike has not left human social relations and philosophical frameworks unaffected. One such framework could be argued to be ecocriticism, a tool of literary analysis that, although not exceptionally new, is not widely applied to contemporary Irish literature yet. In this article, I explore one instance of the animal trope in the novel One Day as a Tiger (1997), written by the Irishwoman Anne Haverty.  The novel could explore and denounce how Irish society has not totally rejected colonialism and its anthropocentric foundation; instead, Haverty’s fictional Ireland seems to have appropriated the colonising discourse once applied to them and turned it against the nonhuman realm, especially animals, to justify their existence as an independent State. Therefore, the aim of this article is to explore if and to what extent the human protagonist of the novel otherises and reduces the nonhuman protagonist, a ewe, into a symbol of Irish nationality.

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Author Biography

Vanesa Roldán Romero, Universidad de Santiago de Compostela

Vanesa Roldán Romero is currently working on her doctoral dissertation under the supervision of Dr. Manuela Palacios González (USC) and Dr. Margarita Carretero González (UGR). Provisionally entitled “The Animal Trope in Contemporary Irish Fiction,” the dissertation explores how the animal trope has been used in contemporary fiction by three Irish female writers and the ethical consequences of each approach. Roldán Romero’s main research interests include contemporary Irish literature, ecocriticism, posthumanism, and non-human ethics.

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Published

2022-04-28

Issue

Section

Articles: General Section