Becoming Centaur

Becoming Centaur PDF Author: Monica Mattfeld
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271079746
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 290

Get Book

Book Description
In this study of the relationship between men and their horses in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England, Monica Mattfeld explores the experience of horsemanship and how it defined one’s gendered and political positions within society. Men of the period used horses to transform themselves, via the image of the centaur, into something other—something powerful, awe-inspiring, and mythical. Focusing on the manuals, memoirs, satires, images, and ephemera produced by some of the period’s most influential equestrians, Mattfeld examines how the concepts and practices of horse husbandry evolved in relation to social, cultural, and political life. She looks closely at the role of horses in the world of Thomas Hobbes and William Cavendish; the changes in human social behavior and horse handling ushered in by elite riding houses such as Angelo’s Academy and Mr. Carter’s; and the public perception of equestrian endeavors, from performances at places such as Astley’s Amphitheatre to the satire of Henry William Bunbury. Throughout, Mattfeld shows how horses aided the performance of idealized masculinity among communities of riders, in turn influencing how men were perceived in regard to status, reputation, and gender. Drawing on human-animal studies, gender studies, and historical studies, Becoming Centaur offers a new account of masculinity that reaches beyond anthropocentrism to consider the role of animals in shaping man.

Becoming Centaur

Becoming Centaur PDF Author: Monica Mattfeld
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271079746
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 290

Get Book

Book Description
In this study of the relationship between men and their horses in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England, Monica Mattfeld explores the experience of horsemanship and how it defined one’s gendered and political positions within society. Men of the period used horses to transform themselves, via the image of the centaur, into something other—something powerful, awe-inspiring, and mythical. Focusing on the manuals, memoirs, satires, images, and ephemera produced by some of the period’s most influential equestrians, Mattfeld examines how the concepts and practices of horse husbandry evolved in relation to social, cultural, and political life. She looks closely at the role of horses in the world of Thomas Hobbes and William Cavendish; the changes in human social behavior and horse handling ushered in by elite riding houses such as Angelo’s Academy and Mr. Carter’s; and the public perception of equestrian endeavors, from performances at places such as Astley’s Amphitheatre to the satire of Henry William Bunbury. Throughout, Mattfeld shows how horses aided the performance of idealized masculinity among communities of riders, in turn influencing how men were perceived in regard to status, reputation, and gender. Drawing on human-animal studies, gender studies, and historical studies, Becoming Centaur offers a new account of masculinity that reaches beyond anthropocentrism to consider the role of animals in shaping man.

Becoming Centaur

Becoming Centaur PDF Author: Monica Mattfeld
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 027107972X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 273

Get Book

Book Description
In this study of the relationship between men and their horses in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England, Monica Mattfeld explores the experience of horsemanship and how it defined one’s gendered and political positions within society. Men of the period used horses to transform themselves, via the image of the centaur, into something other—something powerful, awe-inspiring, and mythical. Focusing on the manuals, memoirs, satires, images, and ephemera produced by some of the period’s most influential equestrians, Mattfeld examines how the concepts and practices of horse husbandry evolved in relation to social, cultural, and political life. She looks closely at the role of horses in the world of Thomas Hobbes and William Cavendish; the changes in human social behavior and horse handling ushered in by elite riding houses such as Angelo’s Academy and Mr. Carter’s; and the public perception of equestrian endeavors, from performances at places such as Astley’s Amphitheatre to the satire of Henry William Bunbury. Throughout, Mattfeld shows how horses aided the performance of idealized masculinity among communities of riders, in turn influencing how men were perceived in regard to status, reputation, and gender. Drawing on human-animal studies, gender studies, and historical studies, Becoming Centaur offers a new account of masculinity that reaches beyond anthropocentrism to consider the role of animals in shaping man.

Theorizing Animals

Theorizing Animals PDF Author: Nik Taylor
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004203605
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 314

Get Book

Book Description
Drawing on current trends in post-modernism and post-humanism this books offers a challenge to current ways of thinking, theorising and talking about animals and humanimal relations

The Centaur

The Centaur PDF Author: John Updike
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 067964587X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 304

Get Book

Book Description
WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD AND THE PRIX DU MEILLEUR LIVRE ÉTRANGER The Centaur is a modern retelling of the legend of Chiron, the noblest and wisest of the centaurs, who, painfully wounded yet unable to die, gave up his immortality on behalf of Prometheus. In the retelling, Olympus becomes small-town Olinger High School; Chiron is George Caldwell, a science teacher there; and Prometheus is Caldwell’s fifteen-year-old son, Peter. Brilliantly conflating the author’s remembered past with tales from Greek mythology, John Updike translates Chiron’s agonized search for relief into the incidents and accidents of three winter days spent in rural Pennsylvania in 1947. The result, said the judges of the National Book Award, is “a courageous and brilliant account of a conflict in gifts between an inarticulate American father and his highly articulate son.”

Becoming Audible

Becoming Audible PDF Author: Austin McQuinn
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271088257
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 201

Get Book

Book Description
Becoming Audible explores the phenomenon of human and animal acoustic entanglements in art and performance practices. Focusing on the work of artists who get into the spaces between species, Austin McQuinn discovers that sounding animality secures a vital connection to the creatural. To frame his analysis, McQuinn employs Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of becoming-animal, Donna Haraway’s definitions of multispecies becoming-with, and Mladen Dolar’s ideas of voice-as-object. McQuinn considers birdsong in the work of Beatrice Harrison, Olivier Messiaen, Céleste Boursier-Mougenot, Daniela Cattivelli, and Marcus Coates; the voice of the canine as a sacrificial lab animal in the operatic work of Alexander Raskatov; hierarchies of vocalization in human-simian cultural coevolution in theatrical adaptations of Franz Kafka and Eugene O’Neill; and the acoustic exchanges among hybrid human-animal creations in Harrison Birtwistle’s opera The Minotaur. Inspired by the operatic voice and drawing from work in art and performance studies, animal studies, zooarchaeology, social and cultural anthropology, and philosophy, McQuinn demonstrates that sounding animality in performance resonates “through the labyrinths of the cultural and the creatural,” not only across species but also beyond the limits of the human. Timely and provocative, this volume outlines new methods of unsettling human exceptionalism during a period of urgent reevaluation of interspecies relations. Students and scholars of human-animal studies, performance studies, and art historians working at the nexus of human and animal will find McQuinn’s book enlightening and edifying.

The Running Centaur

The Running Centaur PDF Author: Sinclair W. Bell
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000525368
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 245

Get Book

Book Description
This book surveys the practice of horse racing from antiquity to the modern period, and in this way offers a selective global history. Unlike previous histories of horse racing, which generally make claims about the exclusiveness of modern sport and therefore diminish the importance of premodern physical contests, the contributors to this book approach racing as a deep history of diachronically comparable practices, discourses, and perceptions centered around the competitive staging of equine speed. In order to compare horse racing cultures from completely different epochs and regions, the authors respond to a series of core issues which serve as structural comparative parameters. These key issues include the spatial and architectural framework of races; their organization; victory prizes; symbolic representations of victories and victors; and the social range and identities of the participants. The evidence of these competitions is interpreted in its distinct historical contexts and with regard to specific cultural conditions that shaped the respective relationship between owners, riders, and horses on the global racetracks of pre-modernity and modernity. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of The International Journal of the History of Sport.

Horse Breeds and Human Society

Horse Breeds and Human Society PDF Author: Kristen Guest
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429656920
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 221

Get Book

Book Description
This book demonstrates how horse breeding is entwined with human societies and identities. It explores issues of lineage, purity, and status by exploring interconnections between animals and humans. The quest for purity in equine breed reflects and evolves alongside human subjectivity shaped by categories of race, gender, class, region, and nation. Focusing on various horse breeds, from the Chincoteague Pony to Brazilian Crioulo and the Arabian horse, each chapter in this collection considers how human and animal identities are shaped by practices of breeding and categorizing domesticated animals. Bringing together different historical, geographical, and disciplinary perspectives, this book will appeal to academics, as well as undergraduate and postgraduate students, in the fields of human-animal studies, sociology, environmental studies, cultural studies, history, and literature.

Centaur Rising

Centaur Rising PDF Author: Jane Yolen
Publisher: Henry Holt and Company (BYR)
ISBN: 0805096655
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 272

Get Book

Book Description
One night during the Perseid meteor shower, Arianne thinks she sees a shooting star land in the fields surrounding her family's horse farm. About a year later, one of their horses gives birth to a baby centaur. The family has enough attention already as Arianne's six-year-old brother was born with birth defects caused by an experimental drug—the last thing they need is more scrutiny. But their clients soon start growing suspicious. Just how long is it possible to keep a secret? And what will happen if the world finds out? At a time when so many novels are set in other worlds, Jane Yolen imagines what it would be like if a creature from another world came to ours in this thoughtfully written, imaginative novel, Centaur Rising. A Christy Ottaviano Book

Becoming John Updike

Becoming John Updike PDF Author: Laurence W. Mazzeno
Publisher: Camden House
ISBN: 1571135111
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 272

Get Book

Book Description
When John Updike died in 2009, tributes from the literary establishment were immediate and fulsome. However, no one reading reviews of Updike's work in the late 1960s would have predicted that kind of praise for a man who was known then as a brilliant stylist who had nothing to say. What changed? Why? And what is likely to be his legacy? These are the questions that Becoming John Updike pursues by examining the journalistic and academic response to his writings. Several things about Updike's career make a reception study appropriate. First, he was prolific: he began publishing fiction and essays in 1956, published his first book in 1958, and from then on, brought out at least one new book each year. Second, his books were reviewed widely - usually in major American newspapers and magazines, and often in foreign ones as well. Third, Updike quickly became a darling of academics; the first book about his work was published in 1967, less than a decade after his own first book. More than three dozen books and hundreds of articles of academic criticism have been devoted to Updike. The present volume will appeal to the continuing interest in Updike's writing among academics and general readers alike. Laurence W. Mazzeno is President Emeritus of Alvernia University. Among other books, he has written volumes on Austen, Dickens, Tennyson, and Matthew Arnold for Camden House's Literary Criticism in Perspective series.

Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance

Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance PDF Author: Keith Botelho
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271094656
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 227

Get Book

Book Description
Lesser Living Creatures examines literary and cultural texts from early modern England in order to understand how people in that era thought about—and with—insect and arachnid life. The conversations in this two-volume set address the collaborative, multigenerational research that produced early modern natural history and provide new insights into the old question of what it means to be human in a world populated by beasts large and small. Volume 2, Concepts, explores ideas that cut across species, insect and otherwise, both building on and invigorating critical vocabularies developed over nearly two decades of early modern animal studies. The contributors explore topics such as the medical and culinary consumption of insects; extermination campaigns; the auditory and emotive effects of a swarm; insects and politics; and notions of infestation, stinging, and creeping. Throughout, they illuminate how early modern science and literature worked as intersecting systems of knowledge production about the natural world and show definitively how insect life was, and remains, intimately entangled with human life. In addition to the editors, contributors to this volume include Lucinda Cole, Frances E. Dolan, Lowell Duckert, Andrew Fleck, Rebecca Laroche, Jennifer Munroe, Amy L. Tigner, Jessica Lynn Wolfe, Derek Woods, and Julian Yates.