Posthumanist Transgressions along the Human-Animal Borderline: H.G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau and Ann Halam’s Dr. Franklin’s Island

This thesis offers a posthumanist reading of two science fiction novels, H.G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896) and Ann Halam’s Dr. Franklin’s Island (2001), and examines human-animal relations through human-animal hybrid characters and their human creators—scientists. Examining the representations of such hybridity as well as the responses to them aims to reveal the anthropocentric mindset embedded in the discourses, ideologies and attitudes observed in the selected novels. The fictional representations of transgressions of human-animal boundaries observed in the novels also offer different ethical stances on human-animal hybrids to compare. The reactions of the characters in the selected novels oscillate between speciesism, which emphasizes the distinction between human and non-human animal species, and trans-speciesism, which seeks to erode the categorical distinction between human and non-human animals, thus inviting people to consider inclusive rather than exclusive ways of seeing and living with animals. In this context, this thesis will treat both Wells’s and Halam’s novels as remnants of anthropocentric ideals, though ironically full of examples of posthumanist potentialities. Thus, this thesis will offer a posthumanist and post-anthropocentric critique of these humanist and anthropocentric novels.