Questioning the human-animal boundary

Abstract

My thesis is about questioning the human-animal boundary. I attempted to carry it through the examination of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels and H. G. Wells' The Island of Doctor Moreau and the underlying concepts behind them. Swift was influenced by Enlightenment notions, while Wells was influenced by evoltuion theory and Darwinism. The thesis is about how both of the authors believed in the impossibility to fully distance mand from animal.