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Examining a wide range of works, from Gulliver's Travels to The Hunger Games, Representing the Modern Animal in Culture employs key theoretical apparatuses of Animal Studies to literary texts. Contributors address the multifarious modes of animal representation and the range of human-animal interactions that have emerged in the past 300 years.
List of contents
Introduction; Jeanne Dubino PART I: IDENTITY: LIVES WITH DOMESTIC ANIMALS IN THE MODERN ERA 1. The Noble Brute: Contradictions in Equine Ideology, East and West; Donna Landry 2. Paying Tribute to the Dogs: Turkish Strays in Nineteenth-Century British Travel Texts; Jeanne Dubino 3. Old Maedhe, Dagda, and the Sidhe: Maud Gonne's Menagerie; Kathryn Kirkpatrick 4. Pets in Memoir; Kevin Ferguson PART II: ANTHROPOMORPHISM: ANIMALS AS METAPHOR IN THE AGE OF DARWIN 5. Darwin's Ants: Evolutionary Theory and Anthropomorphic Fallacy; Alexis Harley 6. Cats, Rats, Apes, and Crabs: T. S. Eliot among the Animals; Emily Essert 7. The Fable, the Moral, and the Animal: Reconsidering the Fable in Animal Studies with Marianne Moore's Elephants; Joshua Schuster 8. Untimely Metamorphoses: Darwin, Baudelaire, Woolf, and Animal Flânerie ; Caroline Pollentier PART III: THE POSTHUMAN: RECONCEIVING NONHUMAN ANIMALS IN THE CONTEMPORARY WORLD 9. Splicing Genes with Postmodern Teens: The Hunger Games and the Hybrid Imagination; Andrew Smyth 10. On the Wings of a Butterfly: Bare Life and Bioart in Eduardo Kac, Marta de Menezes, and Margaret Atwood; Ziba Rashidian 11. Being Out of Time: Animal Gods in Contemporary Extinction Fictions; Susan McHugh 12. Postcolonial Critique in a Multispecies World; Neel Ahuja
About the author
Neel Ahuja, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, USA
Emily Essert, Freelance Researcher and Editor, Canada
Kevin L. Ferguson, Queens College, City University of New York, USA
Alexis Harley, La Trobe University, Australia
Kathryn Kirkpatrick, Appalachian State University, USA
Donna Landry, University of Kent, UK
Susan McHugh, University of New England, USA
Caroline Pollentier, Sorbonne Nouvelle University, France
Joshua Schuster, University of Western Ontario, Canada
Summary
Examining a wide range of works, from Gulliver's Travels to The Hunger Games, Representing the Modern Animal in Culture employs key theoretical apparatuses of Animal Studies to literary texts. Contributors address the multifarious modes of animal representation and the range of human-animal interactions that have emerged in the past 300 years.
Additional text
"From purebred horses and stray dogs to genetic bunnies and monkey vampires, this lively collection of essays reflects the expanding range of topics opened by the field of animal studies. Focusing on the ways we humans have represented our interactions with other animals in the modern era, and the ways such representations can matter for human and non-human lives, the collection brings to light how the experience of modernity is tied up with our real and imagined relations to other species." - Kari Weil, University Professor of Letters, Wesleyan University, USA
"Out of sight, out of mind? The essays in this book identify the tension between the disappearance and presence of the animal subject, with a focus on literature. These intriquing and challenging explorations enrich our understanding that seeing isn't just believing, it's feeling, it's caring. They challenge us to engage in the process of finding a way to be thoughtful about the predicament humans have created for the other animals and ourselves." - Carol J. Adams, author of The Sexual Politics of Meat
"A multi-species world of its own, this collection deftly consolidates crucial new work in animal studies around questions of representation. With crystalline and evocative readings that attend to biopolitical species frameworks, creatures entwined with national, cultural, and scientific knowledge, and to various companionate and agential animals in their particularities, these essays attest to thethrilling range of enlivened thinking that animals invite us to undertake right now in the humanities." - Carrie Rohman, Assistant Professor of English, Lafayette College, USA and author of Stalking the Subject: Modernism and the Animal
