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Poetry. Hybrid Genre. Animal & Environmental Studies. Regional Studies. The history of Illinois, more an idea than a state, is re-presented in the prose poems of LITERATURE FOR NONHUMANS. Illinois was once an ecoparadise teeming with indigenous species. Now it is, Gabriel Gudding tells us, a "notable absence of nonhuman animal," and a starting place to turn inside-out the language of everyday slaughter. ("An Illinois," he writes, "is any region that conceives of the river as a drain.") Gudding's historiographic prose poetry illustrates our changed relation to nonhuman animals. Over and over, we return to the legal torture of pigs explained matter-of-factly by slaughterhouse manuals of the present day. The extended poem- cum-expository essay displays the wild nonhumans of Illinois-birds, mammals, and more- renamed to parody the language of biologists, whose language is a different kind of animal cage. As Gudding tries to break the syntax and shape of language itself, he is fenced in yet again by impenetrable bureaucratic jargon on the slaughter (the "care") of nonhumans. We even relate to rivers differently in "an apocalypse that cannot be seen" because we don't want to see it. Humans hew forests, drain wetlands, make species extinct, and this poet mourns even through his jeremiad. Gudding's afterword is plea and manifesto; every word of LITERATURE FOR NONHUMANS is crucial to a world in which even simple morality strains for life. "Just as Sinclair exposed humanity's lack of humanity in The Jungle over a hundred years ago, Gudding creates, in LITERATURE FOR NONHUMANS, a vivid lyric investigation of our society's current slide from an age of destruction into a new age of extinctions. In this multidisciplinary & interdisciplinary text, Gudding notches every inch between lament and manifesto and intersects every topic from here (piglets, zombies, Illinois) to heaven where, upon arrival, we find 'Christ as an anal robot-king we've set narratively running at the edge of history to serve as a reparator by vicarious redemption.' Prepare to be horrified, crackled, poem-ed. Prepare to be schooled." Amy King"
This book explores the voices of nonhuman things in Anglo-Saxon literature and material culture, making a valuable contribution to 'thing theory'.
The time has come for human cultures to seriously think, to severely conceptualize, and to earnestly fabulate about all the nonhuman critters we share our world with, and to consider how to strive for more ethical cohabitation. Reconfiguring Human, Nonhuman and Posthuman in Literature and Culture tackles this severe matter within the framework of literary and cultural studies. The emphasis of the inquiry is on the various ways actual and fictional nonhumans are reconfigured in contemporary culture - although, as long as the domain of nonhumanity is carved in the negative space of humanity, addressing these issues will inevitably clamor for the reconfiguration of the human as well.
During the Renaissance, horses—long considered the privileged, even sentient companions of knights-errant—gradually lost their special place on the field of battle and, with it, their distinctive status in the world of chivalric heroism. Parrots, once the miraculous, articulate companions of popes and emperors, declined into figures of mindless mimicry. Cats, which were tortured by Catholics in the Middle Ages, were tortured in the Reformation as part of the Protestant attack on Catholicism. And sheep, the model for Agnus Dei imagery, underwent transformations at once legal, material, and spiritual as a result of their changing role in Europe's growing manufacturing and trade economies. While in the Middle Ages these nonhumans were endowed with privileged social associations, personal agency, even the ability to reason and speak, in the early modern period they lost these qualities at the very same time that a new emphasis on, and understanding of, human character was developing in European literature. In Animal Characters Bruce Thomas Boehrer follows five species—the horse, the parrot, the cat, the turkey, and the sheep—through their appearances in an eclectic mix of texts, from romances and poetry to cookbooks and natural histories. He shows how dramatic changes in animal character types between 1400 and 1700 relate to the emerging economy and culture of the European Renaissance. In early modern European culture, animals not only served humans as sources of labor, companionship, clothing, and food; these nonhuman creatures helped to form an understanding of personhood. Incorporating readings of Shakespeare's plays, Milton's Paradise Lost, Margaret Cavendish's Blazing World, and other works, Boehrer's series of animal character studies illuminates a fascinating period of change in interspecies relationships.
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.
This book gathers diverse critical treatments from fifteen scholars of the posthuman and posthumanism together in a single volume.
Throughout the world, people spend much of their time with animal companions of various kinds, frequently with cats and dogs. What meanings do we make of these relationships? In the ecocritical collection Reading cats and Dogs, a diverse array of scholars considers the philosophy, literature, and film devoted to human relationships with companion species. In addition to illuminating famous animal stories by Beatrix Potter, Jack London, Italo Svevo, and Michael Ondaatje, readers are introduced to the dog poems of Shuntarō Tanikawa, a Turkish documentary on stray cats as neighborhood companions, and the representation of diverse animal companions in Cameroonian novels. Focusing on “Stray and Feral Companions,” “The Usefulness of Companion Animals,” and “Problematizing Companion Animals,” Reading Cats and Dogs aims both to confirm and topple readers’ assumptions about the fellow travelers with whom we share our lives, our streets and fields, and our planet. Fifteen contributors from various countries reveal the aesthetic, ethical, and psychological complexities of our multispecies relationships, demonstrating the richness of ecocritical animal studies.
Reading Literary Animals explores the status and representation of animals in literature from the Middle Ages to the present day. Essays by leading scholars in the field examine various figurative, agential, imaginative, ethical, and affective aspects of literary encounters with animality, showing how practices of close reading provoke new ways of thinking about animals and the texts in which they appear. Through investigations of works by Shakespeare, Aphra Behn, William Wordsworth, Charles Dickens, Virginia Woolf, and Ted Hughes, among many others, Reading Literary Animals demonstrates the value of distinctively literary animal studies.
Fiction. Stemming from a through-line of marital discord in the household of the great French vivisector, Claude Bernard, Thalia Field has discovered a number of voices, some famous, some forgotten, and allowed them all a moment in which to be heard again. This compelling tale is made up largely of excerpts and quotations, pieced together with great artistry. A beautiful and thought-provoking collage of a tale of rescued history and a sobering tribute to some of its victims. --Karen Joy Fowler Advancing what she started twenty years ago with her earliest explorations of essayistic fiction, Thalia Field has now composed what very well might be her life's work--a tragic, comical, and utterly fascinating tale of a marriage that vividly encapsulates not only the origins of experimental medicine, but an entire age that spirited experiments in literature, science, engineering, film, etc. It's nothing less than a history--gorgeously fictional, purposefully essayistic--of how we got where we are. --John D'Agata
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.