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It showcases how posthumanism has transformed the humanities and what new work is now possible in light of this unsettling.
The Birth of a Jungle probes the historical emergence of the jungle as a discourse in the U.S during the Progressive Era.
An important task for scholars of cultural studies and the humanities, as well as for artistic creators, is to refigure the frames and concepts by which the world as we know it is kept in place. Without these acts of refiguration, the future could only ever be more of the (violent) same. In close dialogue with literary and cinematic works and practices, the essays of this volume help refigure and rethink such pressing contemporary issues as migration, inequality, racism, post-coloniality, political violence and human-animal relations. A range of fresh perspectives are introduced, amounting to a call for intellectuals to remain critically engaged with the social and planetary.
This book analyzes how African literary texts have engaged with pressing ecological problems in Africa. It is a multi-disciplinary text, for both researchers and scholars of African Studies, the environment and postcolonial literature.
In Creature Discomfort: Fauna-criticism, Ethics, and the Representation of Animals in Spanish American Fiction and Poetry, Scott M. DeVries uncovers a tradition in Spanish American literature where animal-ethical representations anticipate many of the most pressing concerns from present debates in animal studies. The author documents moments from the corpus that articulate long-standing positions such as a defense of animal rights or advocacy for liberationism, that engage in literary philosophical meditations concerning mind theory and animal sentience, and that anticipate current ideas from Critical Animal Studies including the rejection of hierarchical differentiations between the categor...
This Companion offers students and scholars a comprehensive introduction to the development and the diversity of the American short story as a literary form from its origins in the eighteenth century to the present day. Rather than define what the short story is as a genre, or defend its importance in comparison with the novel, this Companion seeks to understand what the short story does – how it moves through national space, how it is always related to other genres and media, and how its inherent mobility responds to the literary marketplace and resonates with key critical themes in contemporary literary studies. The chapters offer authoritative introductions and reinterpretations of a literary form that has re-emerged as a major force in the twenty-first-century public sphere dominated by the Internet.
This volume is the first comprehensive guide to current research on animals, animality, and human-animal relations in literature. To reflect the history of literary animal studies to date, its primary focus is literary prose and poetry in English, while also accommodating emergent discussions of the full range of media and contexts with which literary studies engages, especially film and critical theory. User-friendly language, references, even suggestions for further readings are included to help newcomers to the field understand how it has taken shape primarily through recent decades. To further aid teachers, sections are organized by conventions of periodization, and chapters address a range of canonical and popular texts. Bookended by sections devoted to the field’s conceptual foundations and new directions, the volume is designed to set an agenda for literary animal studies for decades to come.
Examines the painted body of the actor on the early modern stage. Inventions of the Skin illuminates a history of the stage technology of paint that extends backward to the 1460s York cycle and forward to the 1630s. Organized as a series of studies, the four chapters of this book examine goldface and divinity in York's Corpus Christi play, with special attention to the pageant representing The Transfiguration of Christ; bloodiness in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, specifically blood's unexpected role as a device for disguise in plays such as Look About You (anon.) and Shakespeare's Coriolanus; racial masquerade within seventeenth-century court performances and popular plays, from Ben Jonson's Masque of Blackness to William Berkeley's The Lost Lady; and finally whiteface, death, and stoniness"e; in Thomas Middleton's The Second Maiden's Tragedy and Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale. Recovering a crucial grammar of theatrical representation, this book argues that the onstage embodiment of characters--not just the words written for them to speak--forms an important and overlooked aspect of stage representation.
Shakespeare wrote of lions, shrews, horned toads, curs, mastiffs, and hellhounds. But the word “animal” itself only appears very rarely in his work, which was in keeping with sixteenth-century usage. As Laurie Shannon reveals in The Accommodated Animal, the modern human / animal divide first came strongly into play in the seventeenth century, with Descartes’s famous formulation that reason sets humans above other species: “I think, therefore I am.” Before that moment, animals could claim a firmer place alongside humans in a larger vision of belonging, or what she terms cosmopolity. With Shakespeare as her touchstone, Shannon explores the creaturely dispensation that existed until D...
In American history, animals are everywhere. They are a ubiquitous presence in myriad historical, literary, biographical, scientific and other documents and narratives of the American past – a past that, just like the present, was shaped by a multiplicity of relations between humans and other creatures ranging from coexistence and conviviality to hostility, subjugation and extermination. While such quintessentially American species as the bison, the mustang or the grizzly continue to roam the discursive, imaginary and, now to a much lesser degree, the geographical spaces of the nation, the less iconic creatures of civilization – the various species of domesticated working and companion a...