Civilized Creatures

Civilized Creatures PDF Author: Jennifer Mason
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 9780801880711
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
In Civilized Creatures, Jennifer Mason challenges some of our most enduring ideas about how encounters with nonhuman nature shaped American literature and culture. Mason argues that in the second half of the nineteenth century the most powerful influence on Americans' understanding of their affinities with animals was not increasing separation from the pastoral and the wilderness; instead, it was the population's feelings about the ostensibly civilized animals they encountered in their daily lives. Americans of diverse backgrounds, Mason shows, found it attractive as well as politic to imagine themselves as most closely connected to those creatures who shared humans' aptitude for civilized life. And to the minds of many in this period, national prosperity depended less on periodic exposure to untamed, wild nature than it did on the proper care and keeping of such animals within suburban and urban environments. Combining literary analysis with cultural histories of equestrianism, petkeeping, and the animal welfare movement, Civilized Creatures offers new readings of works by Susan Warner, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Charles W. Chesnutt. In each case, Mason demonstrates that understanding contemporary relationships between humans and animals is essential for understanding the debates about gender, race, and cultural power enacted in these texts.

Civilized Creatures

Civilized Creatures PDF Author: Jennifer Mason
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 9780801880711
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
In Civilized Creatures, Jennifer Mason challenges some of our most enduring ideas about how encounters with nonhuman nature shaped American literature and culture. Mason argues that in the second half of the nineteenth century the most powerful influence on Americans' understanding of their affinities with animals was not increasing separation from the pastoral and the wilderness; instead, it was the population's feelings about the ostensibly civilized animals they encountered in their daily lives. Americans of diverse backgrounds, Mason shows, found it attractive as well as politic to imagine themselves as most closely connected to those creatures who shared humans' aptitude for civilized life. And to the minds of many in this period, national prosperity depended less on periodic exposure to untamed, wild nature than it did on the proper care and keeping of such animals within suburban and urban environments. Combining literary analysis with cultural histories of equestrianism, petkeeping, and the animal welfare movement, Civilized Creatures offers new readings of works by Susan Warner, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Charles W. Chesnutt. In each case, Mason demonstrates that understanding contemporary relationships between humans and animals is essential for understanding the debates about gender, race, and cultural power enacted in these texts.

Animal Stories

Animal Stories PDF Author: Susan McHugh
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 0816670323
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 295

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Book Description
How cross-species companionship is figured across a variety of media--and why it matters.

Animal Rights

Animal Rights PDF Author: Lisa Yount
Publisher: Infobase Publishing
ISBN: 1438130635
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
Praise for the previous edition: ...an excellent first-stop resource for research on animal rights...well organized, clearly written, and a great starting point for research...Recommended.-Choice...comprehensive...invaluable for reports on a popular current topic.-VOYA... a] very complete research guide that will be most useful at the high school and college level.-American Reference Books AnnualThe treatment of animals has become a controversial issue over the years, with many questioning an animal's fundamental rights. For some, the issue of animal rights is merely an attempt to improve conditions of animals used for clothing, food, and other products, while others believe animals should be granted the same legal rights afforded to humans. Animal Rights, Revised Edition provides an overview of the history of the animal rights movement and reactions to it, as well as the issues of animal experimentation, conditions on factory farms, laboratory animals, animals in entertainment, hunting, and the actions of those involved in the animal rights debate. New content includes such documents as the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act of 2006 and contemporary court cases such as Animal Legal Defense Fund v. Glickman. These documents provide both past and present perspectives on the issue and plot a course for future debate about animal rights. A comprehensive and up-to-date overview essay, capsule biographies, a large annotated bibliography, a chronology of significant events, organization and agency listings, and a glossary all combine to make this an ideal first-stop reference to animal rights.Coverage includes: Whether medical testing performed on animals is ethicalWhether animals should be banned from circuses and other forms of entertainmentHow threats against investors in companies that participate in animal drug testing should be handle

Mind Over Monsters

Mind Over Monsters PDF Author: Jennifer Harlow
Publisher: Llewellyn Worldwide
ISBN: 0738730521
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 144

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Book Description
Beatrice Alexander is no ordinary schoolteacher—she can move objects with her mind, an embarrassing skill she hasn't yet mastered or embraced. After nearly killing her brother by accident, she joins the F.R.E.A.K.S. Squad, the Federal Response to Extra-Sensory and Kindred Supernaturals. This top-secret branch of the FBI combats ghosts, ghouls, and other monsters threatening humanity. With her teammates—among them a handsome former-detective werewolf and an annoying Don Juan vampire who's dead-set on seducing her—Beatrice investigates her first case. Disgustingly dismembered bodies have turned up, bearing bite marks of the undead. Someone—or something—is raising a horde of hideous, bloodthirsty zombies. Armed with Bette, her trusty machete, Beatrice takes on the master of the flesh-devouring corpses, who's guarding a horrifying secret... Featuring a team of monster hunters with unique paranormal abilities, the F.R.E.A.K.S. Squad Investigation series combines humor, suspense, and supernatural crime-fighting. Praise: "The most engaging detectives to face the walking dead since Scully and Mulder. Part urban fantasy, part police procedural, and entirely marvelous, monstrous fun."—Library Journal "If Donald Westlake had ever gotten around to writing a paranormal mystery, it would have sounded like this. Harlow's genre debut is funny, creepy and refreshingly brash."—Kirkus Reviews "Jennifer Harlow's debut novel had me laughing and gasping from start to finish!"—Victoria Laurie, New York Times bestselling author of the Ghost Hunter Mystery series and the Psychic Eye Mystery series "Wonderful! A gritty, dramatic police-procedural with a compelling heroine and a fascinating group of sidekicks. Looking forward to the sequel!"—Karen Chance, New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of the Cassandra Palmer series "Mind Over Monsters is funny, scary, and creepy—and ridiculous amounts of fun!"—Kat Richardson, author of The Greywalker Novels "Mind Over Monsters is a non-stop rollercoaster ride that fans of urban fantasy will love! Fast-paced, fun, and wildly entertaining, Jennifer Harlow has given the paranormal police procedural a fresh spin with her loveable machete-wielding heroine. A quirky cast of characters and sharp writing make Mind Over Monsters a wholly wonderful debut. I can't wait to read more!"—Jeannie Holmes, author of Blood Law and Blood Secrets "With its breezy style and exuberant sense of fun, this monstery mystery is a total delight!"—Carolyn Crane, author of Mind Games and Double Cross "Wildly fun and funny, Harlow offers treats for every paranormal lover to relish, with plenty of action, thrills and laughter."—Leanna Renee Hieber, award-winning, bestselling author of The Strangely Beautiful series "In her funny, fast-paced debut, Jennifer Harlow gives us an urban fantasy that sharply blends murder-mystery and horror, and introduces us to a world where the monster in your closet really does exist. Using both humor and logic to help solve a grisly double-murder, reluctant heroine Beatrice Alexander is a woman you can (and do) root for as she struggles to control her powerful telekinetic gift and to find her place in this brave (and sometimes scary) new world."—Kelly Meding, author of Three Days to Dead

Enterprising Youth

Enterprising Youth PDF Author: Monika Elbert
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135898545
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
"Recommended" by Choice Enterprising Youth examines the agenda behind the shaping of nineteenth-century children’s perceptions and world views and the transmission of civic duties and social values to children by adults. The essays in this book reveal the contradictions involved in the perceptions of children as active or passive, as representatives of a new order, or as receptacles of the transmitted values of their parents. The question, then, is whether the business of telling children's stories becomes an adult enterprise of conservative indoctrination, or whether children are enterprising enough to read what many of the contributors to this volume see as the subversive potential of these texts. This collection of literary and historical criticism of nineteenth-century American children’s literature draws upon recent assessments of canon formations, gender studies, and cultural studies to show how concepts of public/private, male/female, and domestic/foreign are collapsed to reveal a picture of American childhood and life that is expansive and constrictive at the same time.

Enhancing Humanity

Enhancing Humanity PDF Author: N. Aloni
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1402061684
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 239

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Book Description
In Jean PaulSartre's Nausea, Roquentin feels bound to listen to the sentimental ramblings about humanism and humanity by the Self Taught Man. "Is it my fault," muses Roquentin, "in all he tells me, I recognize the lack of the genuine article? Is it my fault if, as he speaks, I see all the humanists I have known rise up? I have known so many ofthem!" And then he lists the radical humanist, the so called"left" humanist, and Communist Humanist, the Catholic humanist, all claiming a passion for their fellow men. "But there are others, a swarm of others: the humanist philosopher who bends over his brothers like a wise older brother with a sense of his responsibility; the humanist who loves men as they are, the humanist who loves men as they ought to be, the one who wants to save them with their consent, and the one who will save them in spite of themselves. . . . " Quite naturally, the skeptical Roquentin ends by saying how "they all hate each other: as individuals, not as men. " Fully aware of the misuse and false comfort in the use of the term, Professor Aloni proceeds to restore meaning to the word as well as appropriate its educational significance. There is a freshness in this book, a restoration of a lost clarity, a regaining of authentic commitment.

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.

Nothingness and Somethingness

Nothingness and Somethingness PDF Author: Marc Moderessi
Publisher: Xlibris Corporation
ISBN: 1456828789
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
How could an ignorant, insane, inane, incapable creature talk about spiritual, immaterial, nonphysical sign that requires highly rational, intellectual, celestial, transcendental energy, which prerequisites delicate extramentality impressions beyond mundane entity? We have killed humanity in the name of humanity, it is to the end of its last breath, and it is useless to attempt to save it. The question in debate is much more serious, complicated, and also obvious than we have realized. It is not just the question of who, or what we are, but how we have come into this world, and how we have lived without given it real earnest thought. How do we present, draw, or paint a colorless, weightless, countless, faceless, and faultless space? There are always emptiness, void, cavity, darkness, ignorance in the air, clear sky craving for life, and crying for help. Space the only unique element, is everywhere, covering everything indiscriminately offering freedom, and democracy only to enslave all for its purpose to show its true face, feature, and fable. The exact example of perfect nothingness is where, nothing can be found, nor a being exits, but in form of ignorance within emptiness of self. Everything is continuation of nothingness extended everywhere forever, it is the beginning, and the end of all things considered. If intelligence does not learn what nothingness is, it never reaches to other end to see somethingness.

American Beasts

American Beasts PDF Author: Roman Bartosch
Publisher: Neofelis Verlag
ISBN: 3958081002
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 307

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Book Description
In American history, animals are everywhere. They are a ubiquitous presence in myriad historical, literary, biographical, scientific and other documents and narratives of the American past – a past that, just like the present, was shaped by a multiplicity of relations between humans and other creatures ranging from coexistence and conviviality to hostility, subjugation and extermination. While such quintessentially American species as the bison, the mustang or the grizzly continue to roam the discursive, imaginary and, now to a much lesser degree, the geographical spaces of the nation, the less iconic creatures of civilization – the various species of domesticated working and companion animals – have arguably played an even more critical role in the genesis of modern American culture and society throughout the 'long nineteenth century.' Until recently, however, despite their ubiquity in historical documents, social relations and cultural productions, animals have rarely been of serious interest to mainstream historians. American Beasts argues that an adequate understanding of American history, and indeed of 'human' history more broadly, requires a sustained engagement with its multifaceted more-than-human dimensions. The contributions collected here offer various insights into the broad relevance of animality and human-animal relations – from the culture of pet-keeping and the role of animals and animality in the context of slavery and abolition to the emergence of animal athletes at the turn of the twentieth century – as aspects that have always influenced all areas of American society. In addition, by highlighting the ways in which human-animal relations crucially shaped the relations (of power) between different groups of humans, American Beasts shows that a stronger concern with animals and animality also allows us to address the complex intersections between the history of human-animal relations and the histories of (for example) race, class and gender in the United States in the time from the early national period to the Progressive Era.

We Are Hunted

We Are Hunted PDF Author: Tomi Oyemakinde
Publisher: Feiwel & Friends
ISBN: 1250868173
Category : Young Adult Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 231

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Book Description
A boy, his family, and other resort guests must fight for their lives after the island's unusual animals turn feral, in this horrifying fast-paced survival story! Experience paradise, reimagined. When 17-year-old Femi Fatona and his older brother are forced to accompany their dad to an island resort, Femi is not looking forward to it. After all, he hasn't exactly been getting along with either of them lately. At least the resort promises to be full of all the extravagant luxuries they're used to. Yet not much is actually known about it, as it’s on a recently-discovered island and shrouded in nondisclosure agreements. Once they arrive, Femi is thrilled to find that the island is bursting with new and spectacular species of plants and animals. But he soon realizes that sometimes pretty exteriors hide ugly truths—truths that are begging to come to light. When the animals suddenly become feral and the island is thrown into chaos , what was meant to be a peaceful bonding experience quickly becomes the stuff of nightmares. Femi will have to put aside tension with his family and work with other guests in order to escape the animals, the island. . .and his own guilt at the part he may have played in all of it.