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"Animal Land surveys the role of humanized animals in the classic literature for children, and bodes well to become a classic in its own right. It is an entertaining and equally serious and remarkably thorough look into a collective literature which introduced us to our early friends in books. Animals tend to outlive humans in the imaginations of appreciators of children's books. And few of the character encountered in adult fiction seem to remain as vivid and complete in the mind as The Velveteen Rabbit, Babar, Brer Rabbit, Bambi, Black Beauty, and WInnie the Pooh. Meet them again here. Ponder them, because they will not leave us alone" --
Colleen Glenney Boggs puts animal representation at the center of the making of the liberal American subject. Concentrating on the formative and disruptive presence of animals in the writings of Frederick Douglass, Edgar Allan Poe, and Emily Dickinson, Boggs argues that animals are critical to the ways in which Americans enact their humanity and regulate subjects in the biopolitical state. Biopower, or a politics that extends its reach to life, thrives on the strategic ambivalence between who is considered human and what is judged as animal. It generates a space of indeterminacy in which animal representations intervene to define and challenge the parameters of subjectivity. The renegotiation of the species line produces a tension that is never fully regulated. Therefore, as both figures of radical alterity and the embodiment of biopolitics, animals are simultaneously exceptional and exemplary to the biopolitical state. An original contribution to animal studies, American studies, critical race theory, and posthumanist inquiry, Boggs thrillingly reinterprets a long and highly contentious human-animal history.
In this work the author studies the role of toy characters in works ranging from older classics such as Pinocchio and Winnie the Pooh to modern texts such as The Mouse and his Child and the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes science fiction with robots and cyborgs.
Traces the cultural history of the giraffe, includes ancient and contemporary descriptions, and studies the impact of giraffes on the human imagination.
Classic and contemporary poets are represented in this collection of poetry about animals.
Includes entries for maps and atlases.