Men, Dogs and Other Beasts: A Pseudo-Darwinian Reading of Liviu Rebreanu’s „Ion” Drawing partially on the emerging field of animal studies, this paper aims to analyze the representation of animals in Liviu Rebreanu’s Ion from a new perspective. The starting point of my study is that Rebreanu’s fiction signals a decisive departure from the traditional anthropomorphic representation of animals and although it does not identify animals as an instance of alterity, it nonetheless succeeds in instrumentalizing this category in an original manner. Specifically, in Rebreanu’s first novel, the writer puts forward a genuine tropological network (metaphors, similes, epithets, etc.), which, in turn, translates into a biopolitical vision wherein the animal element not only illuminates, but also gives structure to the human. Far from qualifying as a mere bestiary, this novel features a myriad of analogies between the human characters and animals, which provide the former with psychological depth and a more clear position within the biological and social scales.Keywords: animal studies, interwar Romanian novel, tropology, biopolitics, scales
