This dissertation examines the transformative effect of horses on human lives as represented in selected modern Anglo-American literary fictions. Horses offer a valuable perspective from which to consider human-animal relations, given the long history of human-horse co-domestications and the continuing figurative and real presence of horses in human lives. My first case study is Anna Sewell's Black Beauty, his Grooms and Companions: The Autobiography of a Horse, which I read as a historical document representing Victorian era class, gender, and species roles. This text relies heavily on sentimentality and melodrama to appeal to humanitarian virtues, as do contemporary animal rights and welfare discourses. While such appeals can effect concrete change, I argue that figurations of victimization and redemption perpetuate humanist frameworks of difference and privilege.

Human-horse co-domestications shape subjective identifications on a more intimate level as well, which I demonstrate in examining the interactions between the equine characters and the human protagonist in Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness. Drawing out the play of non-normative (transgender) desire in this text, I consider the sexological context of the novel's genesis and psychoanalytic approaches to the work of fantasy in shaping sexual subjectivity. Lesbian and queer revisions of psychoanalytic discourses allow me to examine how horses nurture alternative trajectories for female embodiment and subjectivity. The figure of the "horse-crazy girl" is another intimate manifestation of human-horse co-domestications which, in its popular incarnation, both sexualizes the cross-species relationship and co-opts riding as a form of training in female domesticity. Focusing on Enid Bagnold's National Velvet, I demonstrate that stories of girl-horse love can narrate alternative experiences of relationality, embodiment, and subjectivity. Tracing the emergence of the protagonist's non-normative subjectivity as it evolves through her relationships with horses, I argue for the subversive potential of the girl-horse bond as it bypasses conventional patriarchal and speciesist practices of domestication.

Expanding beyond the focus on horses as individuals and as figures for the human, I conclude by considering narratives that account more fully for the interdependencies of human, animal, and environment. Exemplified in Alice Walker's story "Am I Blue?," with the narrator moving from her interpersonal relationship with the horse Blue to the cultural history of African Americans to the capture and killing of animals for food, I explore this and other realignments of human-animal domestic relations and their practical and ideological outcomes.