Animal Satire

Animal Satire
Author: Robert McKay
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 425
Release: 2023-08-22
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3031248724

Animal Satire presents a cultural history of animal satire, a critically neglected but persistent presence in the history of cultural production, in which animals expose human folly while the strategies of satire expose the folly of human-animal relations. Highlighting the teeming animal presences across the history of satirical expression from Aristophanes to Twitter, with chapters on key works of literature, drama, film, and a plethora of satirical media, Animal Satire reveals the rich rhetorical significance of animality in powering the politics of satire from ancient and medieval through modern and contemporary times. More pressingly, the book makes the case for the significance of satire for understanding the real-world implications of rhetoric about animals in ongoing struggles for justice. By gathering both critical and creative examples from representative media forms, historical periods, and continents, this volume aims to enrich scholarship on the history of satire as well as empower creative practitioners with ideas about its practical applications today.

Stalin in Russian Satire, 1917–1991

Stalin in Russian Satire, 1917–1991
Author: Karen L. Ryan
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
Total Pages: 254
Release: 2009-11-24
Genre: History
ISBN: 0299234436

During Stalin’s lifetime the crimes of his regime were literally unspeakable. More than fifty years after his death, Russia is still coming to terms with Stalinism and the people’s own role in the abuses of the era. During the decades of official silence that preceded the advent of glasnost, Russian writers raised troubling questions about guilt, responsibility, and the possibility of absolution. Through the subtle vehicle of satire, they explored the roots and legacy of Stalinism in forms ranging from humorous mockery to vitriolic diatribe. Examining works from the 1917 Revolution to the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, Karen L. Ryan reveals how satirical treatments of Stalin often emphasize his otherness, distancing him from Russian culture. Some satirists portray Stalin as a madman. Others show him as feminized, animal-like, monstrous, or diabolical. Stalin has also appeared as the unquiet dead, a spirit that keeps returning to haunt the collective memory of the nation. While many writers seem anxious to exorcise Stalin from the body politic, for others he illuminates the self in disturbing ways. To what degree Stalin was and is “in us” is a central question of all these works. Although less visible than public trials, policy shifts, or statements of apology, Russian satire has subtly yet insistently participated in the protracted process of de-Stalinization.

Aspects of Metamorphosis

Aspects of Metamorphosis
Author: D.B.D. Asker
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 180
Release: 2021-12-28
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9004483551

Aspects of Metamorphosis: Fictional Representations of the Becoming Human explores the various forms of metamorphosis found in literature – mostly modern fiction but informed by earlier examples – and the premises upon which the literature of transformation may be said to depend. Instances of metamorphosis are very widespread in modern literature but as yet there has been no attempt to describe this literary-anthropological phenomenon from a larger perspective. This study approaches such a task. The focus of Aspects of Metamorphosis is on human-animal fictional metamorphoses which embody the concept of becoming-human. Gilles Deleuze describes metamorphosis (especially in Kafka) as the becoming-animal. Across the wide range of examples of literary metamorphosis in different languages and cultures, I describe the becoming-animal as an aspect of the becoming human, a radical approach to mankind’s perception of itself, and restoration to itself, through an animal other. Franz Kafka is in many ways an odd man out in the crowd of modern metamorphosists. Other authors across borders, political, geographical and linguistic, present a humanist and moralist perspective that does not represent a fundamental break with the norms and cultural traditions rooted in the past.

The Birth of Modern Political Satire

The Birth of Modern Political Satire
Author: Meredith McNeill Hale
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2020-09-02
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0192573314

Political satire has been a primary weapon of the press since the eighteenth century and is still intimately associated with one of the most important values of western democratic society: the right of individuals to free speech. This study documents one of the most important moments in the history of printed political imagery, when political print became what we would recognise as modern political satire. Contrary to conventional historical and art historical narratives, which place the emergence of political satire in the news-driven coffee-house culture of eighteenth-century London, Meredith M. Hale locates the birth of the genre in the late seventeenth-century Netherlands in the contentious political milieu surrounding William III's invasion of England known as the 'Glorious Revolution'. The satires produced between 1688 and 1690 by the Dutch printmaker Romeyn de Hooghe on the events surrounding William III's campaigns against James II and Louis XIV establish many of the qualities that define the genre to this day: the transgression of bodily boundaries; the interdependence of text and image; the centrality of dialogic text to the generation of meaning; serialized production; and the emergence of the satirist as a primary participant in political discourse. This study, the first in-depth analysis of De Hooghe's satires since the nineteenth century, considers these prints as sites of cultural influence and negotiation, works that both reflected and helped to construct a new relationship between the government and the governed.

The Routledge Handbook of Human-Animal Relations in the Byzantine World

The Routledge Handbook of Human-Animal Relations in the Byzantine World
Author: Przemysław Marciniak
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 507
Release: 2024-12-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 1040157564

Animals have recently become recognized as significant agents of history as part of the ‘animal turn’ in historical studies. Animals in Byzantium were human companions, a source of entertainment and food – it is small wonder that they made their way into literature and the visual arts. Moreover, humans defined themselves and their activities by referring to non-human animals, either by anthropomorphizing animals (as in the case of the Cat-Mice War) or by animalizing humans and their (un)wanted behaviours. The Routledge Handbook of Human-Animal Relations in the Byzantine World offers an in-depth survey of the relationships between humans and non-human animals in the Byzantine Empire. The contributions included in the volume address both material (zooarchaeology, animals as food, visual representations of animals) and immaterial (semiotics, philosophy) aspects of human-animal coexistence in chapters written by leading experts in their field. This book will appeal to students and scholars alike researching Byzantine social and cultural history, as well as those interested in the history of animals. This book marks an important step in the development of animal studies in Byzantium, filling a gap in the wider research on the history of human-animal relations in the Middle Ages.

Ancient Egyptian Animal Fables

Ancient Egyptian Animal Fables
Author: Jennifer Miyuki Babcock
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 216
Release: 2022-06-08
Genre: History
ISBN: 9004466959

This book examines the depictions of anthropomorphised animals found on ostraca and papyri from Deir el-Medina and considers their narrative and artistic purpose within the religious environment of New Kingdom Thebes.

Renaissance Beasts

Renaissance Beasts
Author: Erica Fudge
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Total Pages: 264
Release: 2004-01-29
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780252028809

An anthology that addresses and reassesses how animals were used and regarded in Renaissance culture, the contributors to this unusual collection challenge contemporary as well as historical views of the boundaries and hierarchies humans presume the natural world to contain.

Homeless Dogs & Melancholy Apes

Homeless Dogs & Melancholy Apes
Author: Laura Brown
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 178
Release: 2010
Genre: American literature
ISBN: 9780801448287

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.

What Animals Mean in the Fiction of Modernity

What Animals Mean in the Fiction of Modernity
Author: Philip Armstrong
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 336
Release: 2008-02-19
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1134245173

What Animals Mean in the Fiction of Modernity argues that nonhuman animals, and stories about them, have always been closely bound up with the conceptual and material work of modernity. In the first half of the book, Philip Armstrong examines the function of animals and animal representations in four classic narratives: Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver’s Travels, Frankenstein and Moby-Dick. He then goes on to explore how these stories have been re-worked, in ways that reflect shifting social and environmental forces, by later novelists, including H.G. Wells, Upton Sinclair, D.H. Lawrence, Ernest Hemingway, Franz Kafka, Brigid Brophy, Bernard Malamud, Timothy Findley, Will Self, Margaret Atwood, Yann Martel and J.M. Coetzee. What Animals Mean in the Fiction of Modernity also introduces readers to new developments in the study of human-animal relations. It does so by attending both to the significance of animals to humans, and to animals’ own purposes or designs; to what animals mean to us, and to what they mean to do, and how they mean to live.