Homeless Dogs & Melancholy Apes

Homeless Dogs & Melancholy Apes PDF Author: Laura Brown
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801448287
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 178

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Book Description
Brown shows how the literary works of the 18th century use animal-kind to bring abstract philosophical, ontological, and metaphysical questions into the realm of everyday experience, difference, hierarchy, intimacy, diversity, and transcendence.

Homeless Dogs & Melancholy Apes

Homeless Dogs & Melancholy Apes PDF Author: Laura Brown
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801448287
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 178

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Book Description
Brown shows how the literary works of the 18th century use animal-kind to bring abstract philosophical, ontological, and metaphysical questions into the realm of everyday experience, difference, hierarchy, intimacy, diversity, and transcendence.

Homeless Dogs and Melancholy Apes

Homeless Dogs and Melancholy Apes PDF Author: Laura S. Brown
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 150171662X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 171

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Book Description
In eighteenth-century England, the encounter between humans and other animals took a singular turn with the discovery of the great apes and the rise of bourgeois pet keeping. These historical changes created a new cultural and intellectual context for the understanding and representation of animal-kind, and the nonhuman animal has thus played a significant role in imaginative literature from that period to the present day. In Homeless Dogs and Melancholy Apes, Laura Brown shows how the literary works of the eighteenth century use animal-kind to bring abstract philosophical, ontological, and metaphysical questions into the realm of everyday experience, affording a uniquely flexible perspective on difference, hierarchy, intimacy, diversity, and transcendence. Writers of this first age of the rise of the animal in the modern literary imagination used their nonhuman characters—from the lapdogs of Alexander Pope and his contemporaries to the ill-mannered monkey of Frances Burney's Evelina or the ape-like Yahoos of Jonathan Swift—to explore questions of human identity and self-definition, human love and the experience of intimacy, and human diversity and the boundaries of convention. Later literary works continued to use imaginary animals to question human conventions of form and thought. Brown pursues this engagement with animal-kind into the nineteenth century—through works by Mary Shelley, Charles Dickens, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning—and into the twentieth, with a concluding account of Paul Auster's dog-novel, Timbuktu. Auster's work suggests that—today as in the eighteenth century—imagining other animals opens up a potential for dissonance that creates distinctive opportunities for human creativity.

Ends of Empire

Ends of Empire PDF Author: Laura Brown
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801480959
Category : English literature
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
This book explores the representation of women in english literature from the Restoration to the fall of Walpole.

Kerfol

Kerfol PDF Author: Edith Wharton
Publisher: BoD – Books on Demand
ISBN: 3732652211
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 26

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Book Description
Reproduction of the original: Kerfol by Edith Wharton

Following the Animal

Following the Animal PDF Author: Ann-Sofie Lönngren
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443882461
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
Literary transformations from human to animal have occurred in myths, folklore, fairy tales and narratives from all over the world since ancient times, and have always provided a narrative space for depictions of power, agency, and the radical nature of change. In Following the Animal, these transformations are analysed with regards to their use in modern literature from northern-most Europe, with specific attention being paid to the insights they provide regarding the human-animal relationship, both generally in the industrialized West, and against the background of more specific circumstances in the Nordic area. In three analytic chapters, focusing respectively on Swedish author August Strindberg’s novel Tschandala (1887), Finnish author Aino Kallas’s novel The Wolf’s Bride (1928), and Danish author Karen Blixen/Isak Dinesen’s short story “The Monkey” (1934), along with discussions of a range of other authors and texts, the reader is introduced to several traditions of literary production that both connect to, and differ from, Anglophone and other literature in fascinating ways. In addition to the insights it provides concerning the uses of human-animal transformations in modern Nordic literature, and their significance in relation to “the question of the animal”, Following the Animal also offers literary scholars and students alike a series of useable and transferable strategies for approaching texts from a “more-than-anthropocentric”, human-animal studies perspective. In phrasing and employing the interpretational method of “following the animal” over the text’s surface, up metaphorical elevations, down material wormholes, and in constant dialogue with previous research, this book contributes greatly to both human-animal literary studies specifically, and to the field of literary scholarship generally, in both an international and northern-European context.

Fables of Modernity

Fables of Modernity PDF Author: Laura Brown
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801488443
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
This text expands the territory for cultural and literary criticism by introducing the concept of the cultural fable. In connecting imagination and history through the category of the cultural fable, Brown illuminates the nature of modern experience in the growing metropolitan centres.

Sophie's World

Sophie's World PDF Author: Jostein Gaarder
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 1466804270
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 599

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Book Description
A page-turning novel that is also an exploration of the great philosophical concepts of Western thought, Jostein Gaarder's Sophie's World has fired the imagination of readers all over the world, with more than twenty million copies in print. One day fourteen-year-old Sophie Amundsen comes home from school to find in her mailbox two notes, with one question on each: "Who are you?" and "Where does the world come from?" From that irresistible beginning, Sophie becomes obsessed with questions that take her far beyond what she knows of her Norwegian village. Through those letters, she enrolls in a kind of correspondence course, covering Socrates to Sartre, with a mysterious philosopher, while receiving letters addressed to another girl. Who is Hilde? And why does her mail keep turning up? To unravel this riddle, Sophie must use the philosophy she is learning—but the truth turns out to be far more complicated than she could have imagined.

Simianization

Simianization PDF Author: Wulf D. Hund
Publisher: LIT Verlag Münster
ISBN: 3643907168
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
Contents: Charles W. Mills: Bestial Inferiority. Locating Simianization within Racism - Wulf D. Hund: Racist King Kong Fantasies. From Shakespeare's Monster to Stalin's Ape-Man - David Livingstone Smith, Ioana Panaitiu: Aping the Human Essence. Simianization as Dehumanization - Silvia Sebastiani: Challenging Boundaries. Apes and Savages in Enlightenment - Stefanie Affeldt: Exterminating the Brute. Sexism and Racism in "King Kong" - Susan C. Townsend: The Yellow Monkey. Simianizing the Japanese - Steve Garner: The Simianization of the Irish. Racial Apeing and its Contexts - Kimberly Barsamian Kahn, Phillip Atiba Goff, Jean M. McMahon: Intersections of Prejudice and Dehumanization. Charting a Research Trajectory (Series: ?Racism Analysis - Series B: Yearbooks, Vol. 6) [Subject: Sociology, Race Studies]

Kafka's Zoopoetics

Kafka's Zoopoetics PDF Author: Naama Harel
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472902091
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 217

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Book Description
Nonhuman figures are ubiquitous in the work of Franz Kafka, from his early stories down to his very last one. Despite their prominence throughout his oeuvre, Kafka’s animal representations have been considered first and foremost as mere allegories of intrahuman matters. In recent years, the allegorization of Kafka’s animals has been poetically dismissed by Kafka’s commentators and politically rejected by posthumanist scholars. Such critique, however, has yet to inspire either an overarching or an interdiscursive account. This book aims to fill this lacuna. Positing animal stories as a distinct and significant corpus within Kafka’s entire poetics, and closely examining them in dialogue with both literary and posthumanist analysis, Kafka’s Zoopoetics critically revisits animality, interspecies relations, and the very human-animal contradistinction in the writings of Franz Kafka. Kafka’s animals typically stand at the threshold between humanity and animality, fusing together human and nonhuman features. Among his liminal creatures we find a human transformed into vermin (in “The Metamorphosis”), an ape turned into a human being (in “A Report to an Academy”), talking jackals (in “Jackals and Arabs”), a philosophical dog (in “Researches of a Dog”), a contemplative mole-like creature (in “The Burrow”), and indiscernible beings (in “Josefine, the Singer or the Mouse People”). Depicting species boundaries as mutable and obscure, Kafka creates a fluid human-animal space, which can be described as “humanimal.” The constitution of a humanimal space radically undermines the stark barrier between human and other animals, dictated by the anthropocentric paradigm. Through denying animalistic elements in humans, and disavowing the agency of nonhuman animals, excluding them from social life, and neutralizing compassion for them, this barrier has been designed to regularize both humanity and animality. The contextualization of Kafka's animals within posthumanist theory engenders a post-anthropocentric arena, which is simultaneously both imagined and very real.

Pet Projects

Pet Projects PDF Author: Elizabeth Young
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271085096
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 180

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Book Description
In Pet Projects, Elizabeth Young joins an analysis of the representation of animals in nineteenth-century fiction, taxidermy, and the visual arts with a first-person reflection on her own scholarly journey. Centering on Margaret Marshall Saunders, a Canadian woman writer once famous for her animal novels, and incorporating Young’s own experience of a beloved animal’s illness, this study highlights the personal and intellectual stakes of a “pet project” of cultural criticism. Young assembles a broad archive of materials, beginning with Saunders’s novels and widening outward to include fiction, nonfiction, photography, and taxidermy. She coins the term “first-dog voice” to describe the narrative technique of novels, such as Saunders’s Beautiful Joe, written in the first person from the perspective of an animal. She connects this voice to contemporary political issues, revealing how animal fiction such as Saunders’s reanimates nineteenth-century writing about both feminism and slavery. Highlighting the prominence of taxidermy in the late nineteenth century, she suggests that Saunders transforms taxidermic techniques in surprising ways that provide new forms of authority for women. Young adapts Freud to analyze literary representations of mourning by and for animals, and she examines how Canadian writers, including Saunders, use animals to explore race, ethnicity, and national identity. Her wide-ranging investigation incorporates twenty-first as well as nineteenth-century works of literature and culture, including recent art using taxidermy and contemporary film. Throughout, she reflects on the tools she uses to craft her analyses, examining the state of scholarly fields from feminist criticism to animal studies. With a lively, first-person voice that highlights experiences usually concealed in academic studies by scholarly discourse—such as detours, zigzags, roadblocks, and personal experience—this unique and innovative book will delight animal enthusiasts and academics in the fields of animal studies, gender studies, American studies, and Canadian studies.