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Introduces the field of animal studies as a means of exploring human-animal relations in literature, philosophy, and culture.
List of contents
Part I. Origins: 1. Aristotle's zoology in the medieval world Pieter Beullens; 2. Howling wolves and other beasts: animals and monstrosity in the Middle Ages Luuk Houwen; 3. Medieval bloodsport William Marvin; 4. Animals in late-medieval hagiography and romance David Salter; 5. Lions, mice, and learning from animals in Henryson's Fables Gillian Rudd; Part II. Development: 6. Animals, the devil, and the sacred in early modern English culture Molly Hand; 7. Shakespeare's animal theater Bruce Boehrer; 8. Classify and display: human and animal species, 1600-1815 Matthew Senior; 9. Swift among the locusts: vermin, infestation, and natural philosophy in the eighteenth century Lucinda Cole; 10. Animal subjectivities: gendered literary representation of animal minds in Anna Sewell's Black Beauty Deborah Denenholz Morse; 11. Friedrich Nietzsche on human nature: between philosophical anthropology and animal studies Vanessa Lemm; Part III. Contemporary Perspectives: 12. Opening up a dossier: animals, animalities, and living together with Roland Barthes Michael Lundblad; 13. Animal unfamiliars: a bestiary of time-travel cinema Alanna Thain; 14. Theorizing animals: Heidegger, Derrida, Agamben Matthew Calarco; 15. Becoming animal in the literary field Brian Massumi; 16. Animation and animism Thomas Lamarre; 17. Becoming mammoth: the domestic animal, its synthetic dreams and the pursuit of multispecies f(r)ictions David Jaclin; 18. Bush/animals Peter Kulchyski.
About the author
Bruce Boehrer is Bertram H. Davis Professor of Renaissance literature in the Department of English at Florida State University. His most recent single-author books include Environmental Degradation in Jacobean Drama (Cambridge, 2013) and Animal Characters: Nonhuman Beings in European Literature (2010). From 2000 to 2008 he served as Founding Editor of the Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, and he is editor of A Cultural History of Animals in the Renaissance (2007).Molly Hand is Entrepreneur in Residence and Lecturer in the Department of English at Florida State University. Her scholarly work appears in Renaissance and Reformation/Renaissance et Réforme; Working Subjects in Early Modern English Drama, edited by Michelle Dowd and Natasha Korda (2011); and The Oxford Handbook of Thomas Middleton, edited by Trish Henley and Gary Taylor (2012). She is currently at work on a book-length study of animal familiars in early modern English literature.Brian Massumi is Professor of Communication at the University of Montreal. He specializes in the philosophy of experience, art and media theory, and political philosophy. His most recent books include Ontopower: War, Powers, and the State of Perception (2015), Politics of Affect (2015), and What Animals Teach Us About Politics (2014). He is co-author with Erin Manning of Thought in the Act: Passages in the Ecology of Experience (2014). Also with Erin Manning and the SenseLab collective, he participates in the collective exploration of new ways of bringing philosophical and artistic practices into collaborative interaction.
Summary
This collection provides a wide-ranging survey of where the field of literary animal studies currently stands. It will be a key resource for specialists who wish to keep current on developments in the field, and non-specialists who seek to understand how these fields have shaped the relationship between human and non-human animal life.
