Homeless Dogs and Melancholy Apes

Homeless Dogs and Melancholy Apes PDF Author: Laura Brown
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 150171662X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 183

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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.

Homeless Dogs and Melancholy Apes

Homeless Dogs and Melancholy Apes PDF Author: Laura Brown
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 150171662X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 183

Get Book

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.

Homeless Dogs & Melancholy Apes

Homeless Dogs & Melancholy Apes PDF Author: Laura Brown
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801448287
Category : American literature
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.

Animal Companions

Animal Companions PDF Author: Ingrid H. Tague
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271067446
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 317

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Book Description
Animal Companions explores how eighteenth-century British society perceived pets and the ways in which conversation about them reflected and shaped broader cultural debates. While Europeans kept pets long before the eighteenth century, many believed that doing so was at best frivolous and at worst downright dangerous. Ingrid Tague argues that for Britons of the eighteenth century, pets offered a unique way to articulate what it meant to be human and what society ought to look like. With the dawn of the Enlightenment and the end of the Malthusian cycle of dearth and famine that marked previous eras, England became the wealthiest nation in Europe, with a new understanding of religion, science, and non-European cultures and unprecedented access to consumer goods of all kinds. These transformations generated excitement and anxiety that were reflected in debates over the rights and wrongs of human-animal relationships. Drawing on a broad array of sources, including natural histories, periodicals, visual and material culture, and the testimony of pet owners themselves, Animal Companions shows how pets became both increasingly visible indicators of spreading prosperity and catalysts for debates about the morality of the radically different society emerging in eighteenth-century Britain.

Whose Dog Are You?

Whose Dog Are You? PDF Author: Martin Wallen
Publisher: MSU Press
ISBN: 1628953098
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 190

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Book Description
The intriguing question in the title comes from an inscription on the collar of a dog Alexander Pope gave to the Prince of Wales. When Pope wrote the famous couplet “I am his Highness’ Dog at Kew, / Pray tell me Sir, whose Dog are You?” the question was received as an expression of loyalty. That was an era before there were dog breeds and, not coincidentally, before people were generally believed to develop affectionate bonds with dogs. This interdisciplinary study focuses on the development of dog breeds in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Beginning with the Foxhound—the first modern breed—it examines the aesthetic, political, and technological forces that generate modern human-canine relations. These forces have colluded over the past two hundred years to impose narrow descriptions of human-canine relations and to shape the dogs physically into acceptable and recognizable breeds. The largest question in animal studies today—how alterity affects human-animal relations—cannot fully be considered until the two approaches to this question are understood as complements of one another: one beginning from aesthetics, the other from technology. Most of all, the book asks if we can engage with dogs in ways that allow them to remain dogs.

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.

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.

The Routledge Handbook of Shakespeare and Animals

The Routledge Handbook of Shakespeare and Animals PDF Author: Karen Raber
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000093433
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 694

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Book Description
Shakespeare’s plays have a long and varied performance history. The relevance of his plays in literary studies cannot be understated, but only recently have scholars been looking into the presence and significance of animals within the canon. Readers will quickly find—without having to do extensive research—that the plays are teeming with animals! In this Handbook, Karen Raber and Holly Dugan delve deep into Shakespeare’s World to illuminate and understand the use of animals in his span of work. This volume supplies a valuable resource, offering a broad and thorough grounding in the many ways animal references and the appearance of actual animals in the plays can be interpreted. It provides a thorough overview; demonstrates rigorous, original research; and charts new frontiers in the field through a broad variety of contributions from an international group of well-known and respected scholars.

Human Forms

Human Forms PDF Author: Ian Duncan
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691194181
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
A major rethinking of the European novel and its relationship to early evolutionary science The 120 years between Henry Fielding's Tom Jones (1749) and George Eliot's Middlemarch (1871) marked both the rise of the novel and the shift from the presumption of a stable, universal human nature to one that changes over time. In Human Forms, Ian Duncan reorients our understanding of the novel's formation during its cultural ascendancy, arguing that fiction produced new knowledge in a period characterized by the interplay between literary and scientific discourses—even as the two were separating into distinct domains. Duncan focuses on several crisis points: the contentious formation of a natural history of the human species in the late Enlightenment; the emergence of new genres such as the Romantic bildungsroman; historical novels by Walter Scott and Victor Hugo that confronted the dissolution of the idea of a fixed human nature; Charles Dickens's transformist aesthetic and its challenge to Victorian realism; and George Eliot's reckoning with the nineteenth-century revolutions in the human and natural sciences. Modeling the modern scientific conception of a developmental human nature, the novel became a major experimental instrument for managing the new set of divisions—between nature and history, individual and species, human and biological life—that replaced the ancient schism between animal body and immortal soul. The first book to explore the interaction of European fiction with "the natural history of man" from the late Enlightenment through the mid-Victorian era, Human Forms sets a new standard for work on natural history and the novel.

Animalia Americana

Animalia Americana PDF Author: Colleen Glenney Boggs
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231161239
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
Consulting a diverse archive of literary texts, Colleen Glenney Boggs places animal representation at the center of the making of the liberal American subject. From the bestiality trials of the seventeenth-century Plymouth Plantation to the emergence of sentimental pet culture in the nineteenth, Boggs traces a history of human-animal sexuality in America, one shaped by sexualized animal bodies and affective pet relations. Boggs concentrates on the formative and disruptive presence of animals in the writings of Frederick Douglass, Edgar Allan Poe, and Emily Dickinson. Engaging with the critical theories of Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, Judith Butler, Donna Haraway and others, she 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 where 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.

Early Modern Emotions

Early Modern Emotions PDF Author: Susan Broomhall
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1315441349
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 561

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Book Description
Early Modern Emotions is a student-friendly introduction to the concepts, approaches and sources used to study emotions in early modern Europe, and to the perspectives that analysis of the history of emotions can offer early modern studies more broadly. The volume is divided into four sections that guide students through the key processes and practices employed in current research on the history of emotions. The first explains how key terms and concepts in the study of emotions relate to early modern Europe, while the second focuses on the unique ways in which emotions were conceptualized at the time. The third section introduces a range of sources and methodologies that are used to analyse early modern emotions. The final section includes a wide-ranging selection of thematic topics covering war, religion, family, politics, art, music, literature and the non-human world to show how analysis of emotions may offer new perspectives on the early modern period more broadly. Each section offers bite-sized, accessible commentaries providing students new to the history of emotions with the tools to begin their own investigations. Each entry is supported by annotated further reading recommendations pointing students to the latest research in that area and at the end of the book is a general bibliography, which provides a comprehensive list of current scholarship. This book is the perfect starting point for any student wishing to study emotions in early modern Europe.