Animals, Animality, and Literature

Animals, Animality, and Literature PDF Author: Bruce Boehrer
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108581161
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 775

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Book Description
Animals, Animality, and Literature offers readers a one-volume survey of the field of literary animal studies in both its theoretical and applied dimensions. Focusing on English literary history, with scrupulous attention to the interplay between English and foreign influences, this collection gathers together the work of nineteen internationally noted specialists in this growing discipline. Offering discussion of English literary works from Beowulf to Virginia Woolf and beyond, this book explores the ways human/animal difference has been historically activated within the literary context: in devotional works, in philosophical and zoological treatises, in plays and poems and novels, and more recently within emerging narrative genres such as cinema and animation. With an introductory overview of the historical development of animal studies and afterword looking to the field's future possibilities, Animals, Animality, and Literature provides a wide-ranging survey of where this discipline currently stands.

Animals, Animality, and Literature

Animals, Animality, and Literature PDF Author: Bruce Boehrer
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108581161
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 775

Get Book

Book Description
Animals, Animality, and Literature offers readers a one-volume survey of the field of literary animal studies in both its theoretical and applied dimensions. Focusing on English literary history, with scrupulous attention to the interplay between English and foreign influences, this collection gathers together the work of nineteen internationally noted specialists in this growing discipline. Offering discussion of English literary works from Beowulf to Virginia Woolf and beyond, this book explores the ways human/animal difference has been historically activated within the literary context: in devotional works, in philosophical and zoological treatises, in plays and poems and novels, and more recently within emerging narrative genres such as cinema and animation. With an introductory overview of the historical development of animal studies and afterword looking to the field's future possibilities, Animals, Animality, and Literature provides a wide-ranging survey of where this discipline currently stands.

Animals, Animality, and Literature

Animals, Animality, and Literature PDF Author: Bruce Boehrer
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9781108429825
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Animals, Animality, and Literature offers readers a one-volume survey of the field of literary animal studies in both its theoretical and applied dimensions. Focusing on English literary history, with scrupulous attention to the interplay between English and foreign influences, this collection gathers together the work of nineteen internationally noted specialists in this growing discipline. Offering discussion of English literary works from Beowulf to Virginia Woolf and beyond, this book explores the ways human/animal difference has been historically activated within the literary context: in devotional works, in philosophical and zoological treatises, in plays and poems and novels, and more recently within emerging narrative genres such as cinema and animation. With an introductory overview of the historical development of animal studies and afterword looking to the field's future possibilities, Animals, Animality, and Literature provides a wide-ranging survey of where this discipline currently stands.

Animalities

Animalities PDF Author: Michael Lundblad
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 1474423965
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 347

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Book Description
New and cutting-edge work in animality studies, human-animal studies, and posthumanismRepresentations of animality continue to proliferate in various kinds of literary and cultural texts. This pioneering volume explores the critical interface between animal and animality studies, marking out the terrain in relation to twentieth-century literature and film. The range of texts considered here is intentionally broad, answering questions like, how do contemporary writers such as Amitav Ghosh, Terry Tempest Williams, and Indra Sinha help us to think about not only animals but also humans as animals? What kinds of creatures are being constructed by contemporary artists such as Patricia Piccinini, Alexis Rockman, and Michael Pestel? How do aanimalities animate such diverse texts as the poetry of two women publishing under the name of aMichael Field, or an early film by Thomas Edison depicting the electrocution of a circus elephant named Topsy? Connecting these issues to fields as diverse as environmental studies and ecocriticism, queer theory, gender studies, feminist theory, illness and disability studies, postcolonial theory, and biopolitics, the volume also raises further questions about disciplinarity itself, while hoping to inspire further work abeyond the human in future interdisciplinary scholarship.Key Features10 provocative case studies focused on representations and discourses of animals and animality in twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature, art, and film in EnglishNew work from both internationally renowned and emerging figures in the burgeoning fields of animality studies, human-animal studies, and posthumanism, suggesting innovative and significant new directions to exploreBroad introduction to the kinds of questions scholars in the humanities have considered in relation to animals and animality

Writing Animals

Writing Animals PDF Author: Timothy C. Baker
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3030038807
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 239

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Book Description
This book surveys a broad range of contemporary texts to show how representations of human-animal relations challenge the anthropocentric nature of fiction. By looking at the relation between language and suffering in twenty-first-century fiction and drawing on a wide range of theoretical approaches, Baker suggests new opportunities for exploring the centrality of nonhuman animals in recent fiction: writing animal lives leads to new narrative structures and forms of expression. These novels destabilise assumptions about the nature of pain and vulnerability, the burden of literary inheritance, the challenge of writing the Anthropocene, and the relation between text and image. Including both well-known authors and emerging talents, from J.M. Coetzee and Karen Joy Fowler to Sarah Hall, Alexis Wright, and Max Porter, and texts from experimental fiction to work for children, Writing Animals offers an original perspective on both contemporary fiction and the field of literary animal studies.

Creaturely Poetics

Creaturely Poetics PDF Author: Anat Pick
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231147872
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 266

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Book Description
Simone Weil once wrote that "the vulnerability of precious things is beautiful because vulnerability is a mark of existence." With these words, she established a relationship among vulnerability, beauty, and existence that transcends the boundaries separating the species. Her conception of a radical ethics and aesthetics could be characterized as a new "poetics of species," that forces us to rethink the significance of the body, both human and animal. Exploring the "logic of flesh," or how art and culture use the body to mark species identity, Anat Pick reimagines a poetics that begins with the vulnerability of bodies, not the omnipotence of thought. Offering a powerful alternative to more personalist visions of morality, Pick proposes a "creaturely" approach based on the shared embodiedness of humans and animals and a postsecular perspective on human-animal relations. She turns to literature, film, and other cultural texts that prioritize the inhuman and challenge the familiar inventory of the human (consciousness, language, morality, and dignity). She reintroduces Weil's crucially important work and its elaboration of themes such as witnessing, commemoration, and collective memory, and she moves away from assumptions about animal "otherness" and nonhuman subjectivities. Pick identifies the "animal" within all humans, emphasizing the corporeal and its issues of power and freedom. In her creaturely view, powerlessness is the point at which both aesthetic and ethical thinking must begin.

Animals and Humans in German Literature, 1800-2000

Animals and Humans in German Literature, 1800-2000 PDF Author: Lorella Bosco
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527560643
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 178

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Book Description
The recent emergence of the discipline of literary animal studies regards literature in itself as constitutive element of a history of knowledge. The discipline has led not only to the expansion of the corpus of texts traditionally connected with animals, but also established new concepts and methods for revising conventional cultural dichotomies (subject and object, human and animal). The 10 essays collected in this volume are devoted to a wide range of case studies on the relationship between animality and poetics in German-language literature since the 19th century. They display a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches to a number of texts packed with references to animals, considered not primarily as objects of literature, but as agents endowed with an active role in the production of literature, and which have left repressed or forgotten traces in texts.

Pets and Domesticity in Victorian Literature and Culture

Pets and Domesticity in Victorian Literature and Culture PDF Author: Monica Flegel
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317564863
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
Addressing the significance of the pet in the Victorian period, this book examines the role played by the domestic pet in delineating relations for each member of the "natural" family home. Flegel explores the pet in relation to the couple at the head of the house, to the children who make up the family’s dependents, and to the common familial "outcasts" who populate Victorian literature and culture: the orphan, the spinster, the bachelor, and the same-sex couple. Drawing upon both animal studies and queer theory, this study stresses the importance of the domestic pet in elucidating normative sexuality and (re)productivity within the familial home, and reveals how the family pet operates as a means of identifying aberrant, failed, or perverse familial and gender performances. The family pet, that is, was an important signifier in Victorian familial ideology of the individual family unit’s ability to support or threaten the health and morality of the nation in the Victorian period. Texts by authors such as Clara Balfour, Juliana Horatia Ewing, E. Burrows, Bessie Rayner Parkes, Anne Brontë, George Eliot, Frederick Marryat, and Charles Dickens speak to the centrality of the domestic pet to negotiations of gender, power, and sexuality within the home that both reify and challenge the imaginary structure known as the natural family in the Victorian period. This book highlights the possibilities for a familial elsewhere outside of normative and restrictive models of heterosexuality, reproduction, and the natural family, and will be of interest to those studying Victorian literature and culture, animal studies, queer studies, and beyond.

The Palgrave Handbook of Animals and Literature

The Palgrave Handbook of Animals and Literature PDF Author: Susan McHugh
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030397734
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 631

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Book Description
This volume is the first comprehensive guide to current research on animals, animality, and human-animal relations in literature. To reflect the history of literary animal studies to date, its primary focus is literary prose and poetry in English, while also accommodating emergent discussions of the full range of media and contexts with which literary studies engages, especially film and critical theory. User-friendly language, references, even suggestions for further readings are included to help newcomers to the field understand how it has taken shape primarily through recent decades. To further aid teachers, sections are organized by conventions of periodization, and chapters address a range of canonical and popular texts. Bookended by sections devoted to the field’s conceptual foundations and new directions, the volume is designed to set an agenda for literary animal studies for decades to come.

Childhood and Pethood in Literature and Culture

Childhood and Pethood in Literature and Culture PDF Author: Anna Feuerstein
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1315386208
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
Bringing together new perspectives in childhood studies and animal studies, this book is the first collection to critically address the manifold alignments and frequent co-constitutions of children and pets in our families, our cultures, and our societies. The cultural politics of power shaping relationships between children, pets, and adults inform the wide range of essays included in this collection, as they explore issues such as protection, discipline, mastery, wildness, play, and domestication. The volume use the frequent social and cultural intersections between children and pets as an opportunity to analyze institutions that create pet and child subjectivity, from education and training to putting children and pets on display for entertainment purposes. Essays analyze legal discourses, visual culture, literature for children and adults, migration narratives, magazines for children, music, and language socialization to discuss how notions of nationalism, race, gender, heteronormativity, and speciesism shape cultural constructions of children and pets. Examining childhood and pethood in America, Europe, Asia, and the Pacific, this collection shows how discourses linking children and pets are pervasive and work across cultures. By presenting innovative approaches to the child and the pet, the book brings to light alternative paths toward understanding these figures, leading to new openings and questions about kinship, agency, and the power of care that so often shapes our relationships with children and animals. This will be an important volume for scholars of animal studies, childhood studies, children’s literature, cultural studies, political theory, education, art history, and sociology.

Animals and the Human Imagination

Animals and the Human Imagination PDF Author: Aaron Gross
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231152973
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 390

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Book Description
This interdisciplinary and cross-cultural collection reflects the growth of animal studies as an independent field and the rise of 'animality' as a critical lens through which to analyze society and culture, on par with race and gender.