Animals, Literature and the Politics of Representation

Animals, Literature and the Politics of Representation PDF Author: J. Simons
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230513549
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 218

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Book Description
This book addresses the question of animal rights in the context of literary criticism. Working from a committed position, it asks the question, 'What would literary studies look like if we took animal rights seriously?' It offers critical surveys of the main themes in the history of animal rights and some of the more important contemporary positions together with readings of a wide range of literary texts from classical antiquity to the present day.

Animals, Literature and the Politics of Representation

Animals, Literature and the Politics of Representation PDF Author: J. Simons
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230513549
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 218

Get Book

Book Description
This book addresses the question of animal rights in the context of literary criticism. Working from a committed position, it asks the question, 'What would literary studies look like if we took animal rights seriously?' It offers critical surveys of the main themes in the history of animal rights and some of the more important contemporary positions together with readings of a wide range of literary texts from classical antiquity to the present day.

Animals, Literature and the Politics of Representation

Animals, Literature and the Politics of Representation PDF Author: J. Simons
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN: 9780333745144
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This book addresses the question of animal rights in the context of literary criticism. Working from a committed position, it asks the question, 'What would literary studies look like if we took animal rights seriously?' It offers critical surveys of the main themes in the history of animal rights and some of the more important contemporary positions together with readings of a wide range of literary texts from classical antiquity to the present day.

Posthumanist Perspectives on Literary and Cultural Animals

Posthumanist Perspectives on Literary and Cultural Animals PDF Author: Krishanu Maiti
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030761592
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
This book offers Posthumanist readings of animal-centric literary and cultural texts. The contributors put the precepts and premises of humanism into question by seriously considering the animal presence in texts. The essays collected here focus primarily on literary and cultural texts from varied theoretically informed interdisciplinary perspectives advanced by critical approaches such as Critical Animal Studies and Posthumanism. Contributors select texts that cut across geographical and period boundaries and demonstrate how practices of close reading give rise to new ways of thinking about animals. By implicating the “animal turn” in the field of literary and cultural studies, this book urges us to problematize the separation of the human from other animals and rethink the hierarchical order of beings through close readings of select texts. It offers fresh perspectives on Posthumanist theory, inviting readers to revisit those criteria that created species’ difference from the early ages of human civilization. This book constitutes a rich and thorough scholarly resource on the politics of representation of animals in literature and culture. The essays in this book are empirically and theoretically informed and explore a range of dynamic, captivating, and highly relevant topics. Comprising over 15 chapters by a team of international contributors, this book is divided into four parts: Contestation over Species Hierarchy and CategorizationAnimal (Re)constructionsInterspecies RelationalitiesIntersectionality- Animal and Gender This book will be essential reading for students and researchers of Critical Animal Studies and Environmental Studies.

Creature Discomfort

Creature Discomfort PDF Author: Scott M. DeVries
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004316590
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
Creature Discomfort innovates the notion of “fauna-criticism” to reframe the literary history of and expound animal ethical positions from Spanish American nineteenth century, modernista, Regional, indigenista, and contemporary fiction and poetry.

Literature and Animal Studies

Literature and Animal Studies PDF Author: Mario Ortiz-Robles
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 113474062X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 189

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Book Description
Why do animals talk in literature? In this provocative book, Mario Ortiz Robles tracks the presence of animals across an expansive literary archive to argue that literature cannot be understood as a human endeavor apart from its capacity to represent animals. Focusing on the literary representation of familiar animals, including horses, dogs, cats, and songbirds, Ortiz Robles examines the various tropes literature has historically employed to give meaning to our fraught relations with other animals. Beyond allowing us to imagine the lives of non-humans, literature can make a lasting contribution to Animal Studies, an emerging discipline within the humanities, by showing us that there is something fictional about our relation to animals. Literature and Animal Studies combines a broad mapping of literary animals with detailed readings of key animal texts to offer a new way of organizing literary history that emphasizes genera over genres and a new way of classifying animals that is premised on tropes rather than taxa. The book makes us see animals and our relation to them with fresh eyes and, in doing so, prompts us to review the role of literature in a culture that considers it an endangered art form.

The Concept of Representation

The Concept of Representation PDF Author: Hanna F. Pitkin
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520340507
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 332

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Book Description
Being concerned with representation, this book is about an idea, a concept, a word. It is primarily a conceptual analysis, not a historical study of the way in which representative government has evolved, nor yet an empirical investigation of the behavior of contemporary representatives or the expectations voters have about them. Yet, although the book is about a word, it is not about mere words, not merely about words. For the social philosopher, for the social scientist, words are not "mere"; they are the tools of his trade and a vital part of his subject matter. Since human beings are not merely political animals but also language-using animals, their behavior is shaped by their ideas. What they do and how they do it depends upon how they see themselves and their world, and this in turn depends upon the concepts through which they see. Learning what "representation" means and learning how to represent are intimately connected. But even beyond this, the social theorist sees the world through a network of concepts. Our words define and delimit our world in important ways, and this is particularly true of the world of human and social things. For a zoologist may capture a rare specimen and simply observe it; but who can capture an instance of representation (or of power, or of interest)? Such things, too, can be observed, but the observation always presupposes at least a rudimentary conception of what representation (or power, or interest) is, what counts as representation, where it leaves off and some other phenomenon begins. Questions about what representation is, or is like, are not fully separable from the question of what "representation" means. This book approaches the former questions by way of the latter.

Animalia Americana

Animalia Americana PDF Author: Colleen Glenney Boggs
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 023153194X
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
Colleen Glenney Boggs puts animal representation at the center of the making of the liberal American subject. Concentrating on the formative and disruptive presence of animals in the writings of Frederick Douglass, Edgar Allan Poe, and Emily Dickinson, Boggs argues that animals are critical to the ways in which Americans enact their humanity and regulate subjects in the biopolitical state. Biopower, or a politics that extends its reach to life, thrives on the strategic ambivalence between who is considered human and what is judged as animal. It generates a space of indeterminacy in which animal representations intervene to define and challenge the parameters of subjectivity. The renegotiation of the species line produces a tension that is never fully regulated. Therefore, as both figures of radical alterity and the embodiment of biopolitics, animals are simultaneously exceptional and exemplary to the biopolitical state. An original contribution to animal studies, American studies, critical race theory, and posthumanist inquiry, Boggs thrillingly reinterprets a long and highly contentious human-animal history.

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

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.

Other Animals in Twenty-First Century Fiction

Other Animals in Twenty-First Century Fiction PDF Author: Catherine Parry
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 331955932X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 245

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Book Description
This book is about ordinary animals and how they are imagined in twenty-first century fiction. Examining contemporary animal representations and the fraught and potent distinctions humans fashion between themselves and all other animals, it asks how a range of novels make, re-make or un-make traditional conceptions of the creatures we love, admire, eat, vilify and abuse. Other Animals’ detailed readings of horses, an animalised human, a donkey, ants, chickens and chimpanzees develop new critical practices in Literary Animal Studies. They explore the connections between fictional animal representation, narrative form, ethics, and the lives and warm bodies of the real-world creatures that precede and exceed our imagination. Human-animal relationships are conditioned by our imaginative shapings of other animals, and by our sense of distinction from them, and Other Animals opens out how fictional animal forms and tropes respond to, participate in, or challenge the ways animals’ lives are lived out in consequence of human imaginings of them.