Animals, Literature and the Politics of Representation

Animals, Literature and the Politics of Representation
Author: J. Simons
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 231
Release: 2001-12-03
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0230513549

This book addresses the question of animal rights in the context of literary criticism. Working from a committed position, it asks the question, 'What would literary studies look like if we took animal rights seriously?' It offers critical surveys of the main themes in the history of animal rights and some of the more important contemporary positions together with readings of a wide range of literary texts from classical antiquity to the present day.

Posthumanist Perspectives on Literary and Cultural Animals

Posthumanist Perspectives on Literary and Cultural Animals
Author: Krishanu Maiti
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 192
Release: 2021-09-11
Genre: Education
ISBN: 3030761592

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.

Literature and Animal Studies

Literature and Animal Studies
Author: Mario Ortiz-Robles
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 189
Release: 2016-06-17
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 113474062X

Why do animals talk in literature? In this provocative book, Mario Ortiz Robles tracks the presence of animals across an expansive literary archive to argue that literature cannot be understood as a human endeavor apart from its capacity to represent animals. Focusing on the literary representation of familiar animals, including horses, dogs, cats, and songbirds, Ortiz Robles examines the various tropes literature has historically employed to give meaning to our fraught relations with other animals. Beyond allowing us to imagine the lives of non-humans, literature can make a lasting contribution to Animal Studies, an emerging discipline within the humanities, by showing us that there is something fictional about our relation to animals. Literature and Animal Studies combines a broad mapping of literary animals with detailed readings of key animal texts to offer a new way of organizing literary history that emphasizes genera over genres and a new way of classifying animals that is premised on tropes rather than taxa. The book makes us see animals and our relation to them with fresh eyes and, in doing so, prompts us to review the role of literature in a culture that considers it an endangered art form.

Animals and Society

Animals and Society
Author: Margo DeMello
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 488
Release: 2012
Genre: History
ISBN: 0231152957

This textbook provides a full overview of human-animal studies. It focuses on the conceptual construction of animals in American culture and the way in which it reinforces and perpetuates hierarchical human relationships rooted in racism, sexism, and class privilege.

Animal Fiction in Late Twentieth-Century Canada

Animal Fiction in Late Twentieth-Century Canada
Author: Alice Higgs
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 165
Release: 2023-12-11
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3031426126

Animal Fiction in Late Twentieth-Century Canada fulfils a vital contribution to the conversation surrounding animal representation as a point of continuity in national narratives and supports the idea that focusing on narratives of responsibility and care influences better relations with both non-human animals and across settler-Indigenous boundaries. Alice Higgs engages with on-going debates regarding reconciliation by demonstrating that it is imperative to critique settler colonial environmental frameworks and place autonomy back into Indigenous communities by bringing Indigenous practices of custodianship and relationality to bear more generally. This book also develops a number of conversations in animal studies in relation to the politics of representation. Higgs studies a range of canonical Canadian authors, demonstrating a progress across the period in which it is possible to identify the emergence of a literary pro-animal turn.

Postcolonial Ecocriticism

Postcolonial Ecocriticism
Author: Graham Huggan
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 406
Release: 2009-12-04
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1136966382

In Postcolonial Ecocriticism, Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin examine relationships between humans, animals and the environment in postcolonial texts. Divided into two sections that consider the postcolonial first from an environmental and then a zoocritical perspective, the book looks at: narratives of development in postcolonial writing entitlement and belonging in the pastoral genre colonialist 'asset stripping' and the Christian mission the politics of eating and representations of cannibalism animality and spirituality sentimentality and anthropomorphism the place of the human and the animal in a 'posthuman' world. Making use of the work of authors as diverse as J.M. Coetzee, Joseph Conrad, Daniel Defoe, Jamaica Kincaid and V.S. Naipaul, the authors argue that human liberation will never be fully achieved without challenging how human societies have constructed themselves in hierarchical relation to other human and nonhuman communities, and without imagining new ways in which these ecologically connected groupings can be creatively transformed.

The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism

The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism
Author: Greg Garrard
Publisher: Oxford Handbooks
Total Pages: 601
Release: 2014
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0199742928

The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism explores a range of critical perspectives used to analyze literature, film, and the visual arts in relation to the natural environment. Since the publication of field-defining works by Lawrence Buell, Jonathan Bate, and Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm in the 1990s, ecocriticism has become a conventional paradigm for critical analysis alongside queer theory, deconstruction, and postcolonial studies. The field includes numerous approaches, genres, movements, and media, as the essays collected here demonstrate. The contributors come from around the globe and, similarly, the literature and media covered originate from several countries and continents. Taken together, the essays consider how literary and other cultural productions have engaged with the natural environment to investigate climate change, environmental justice, sustainability, the nature of "humanity," and more. Featuring thirty-four original chapters, the volume is organized into three major areas. The first, History, addresses topics such as the Renaissance pastoral, Romantic poetry, the modernist novel, and postmodern transgenic art. The second, Theory, considers how traditional critical theories have expanded to include environmental perspectives. Included in this section are essays on queer theory, science studies, deconstruction, and postcolonialism. Genre, the final major section, explores the specific artforms that have animated the field over the past decade, including nature writing, children's literature, animated films, and digital media. A short section entitled Views from Here concludes the handbook by zeroing in on the various transnational perspectives informing the continued dissemination and globalization of the field.

Victorian Animal Dreams

Victorian Animal Dreams
Author: Deborah Denenholz Morse
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 513
Release: 2017-05-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1351875957

The Victorian period witnessed the beginning of a debate on the status of animals that continues today. This volume explicitly acknowledges the way twenty-first-century deliberations about animal rights and the fact of past and prospective animal extinction haunt the discussion of the Victorians' obsession with animals. Combining close attention to historical detail with a sophisticated analytical framework, the contributors examine the various forms of human dominion over animals, including imaginative possession of animals in the realms of fiction, performance, and the visual arts, as well as physical control as manifest in hunting, killing, vivisection and zookeeping. The diverse range of topics, analyzed from a contemporary perspective, makes the volume a significant contribution to Victorian studies. The conclusion by Harriet Ritvo, the pre-eminent authority in the field of Victorian/animal studies, provides valuable insight into the burgeoning field of animal studies and points toward future studies of animals in the Victorian period.

Animals, Plants and Afterimages

Animals, Plants and Afterimages
Author: Valérie Bienvenue
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 460
Release: 2022-03-11
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 1800734263

The sixth mass extinction or Anthropocene extinction is one of the most pervasive issues of our time. Animals, Plants and Afterimages brings together leading scholars in the humanities and life sciences to explore how extinct species are represented in art and visual culture, with a special emphasis on museums. Engaging with celebrated cases of vanished species such as the quagga and the thylacine as well as less well-known examples of animals and plants, these essays explore how representations of recent and ancient extinctions help advance scientific understanding and speak to contemporary ecological and environmental concerns.