Mark Payne: How Can Literary Imagination Help Us Engage with the Lives of Other Animals?

This question represents one of the liveliest areas of inquiry in the humanities, and Mark Payne seeks to answer it by exploring the relationship between human beings and other animals in writings from antiquity to the present. Ranging from ancient Greek poets to modernists such as Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams, Payne considers how writers have used verse to communicate the experience of animal suffering, created analogies between human and animal societies, and imagined the kind of knowledge that would be possible if human beings could see themselves as animals see them. — Editor's note from The Animal Part (University of Chicago Press, 2010)

Mark Payne is a professor in the Department of Classics and the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. He is the author of Theocritus and the Invention of Fiction and The Animal Part.