A Cultural History of Animals: In the modern age

Author: Linda Kalof
Publisher: Berg Publishers
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 272

Book Description
Choice Outstanding Academic Title, 2008 HARDBACK SET A Cultural History of Animals is a multi-volume project on the history of human-animal relations from ancient times to the present. The set of six volumes covers 4500 years of human-animal interaction. Volume 1: Antiquity to the Dark Ages (2500BC - 1000AD) Volume 2: The Medieval Age (1000-1400) Volume 3: The Renaissance (1400-1600) Volume 4: The Enlightenment (1600-1800) Volume 5: The Age of Empire (1800-1920) Volume 6: The Modern Age (1920-2000, including a discussion of animals of the future) As the same issues are central to animal-human relations throughout history, each volume shares the same structure, with chapters in each volume analysing the same issues and themes. In this way each volume can be read individually to cover a specific period and individual chapters can be read across volumes to follow a theme across history. Each volume explores: the sacred and the symbolic (totem, sacrifice, status and popular beliefs), hunting; domestication (taming, breeding, labour and companionship); entertainment and exhibitions (the menagerie, zoos, circuses and carnivals); science and specimens (research, education, collections and museums); philosophical beliefs; and artistic representations. The full six volume set combines to present the most authoritative and comprehensive survey available on animals through history. INDIVIDUAL VOLUMES AVAILABLE

Animals and Society

Author: Margo DeMello
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231152957
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 488

Book Description
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.

Rabid

Author: Bill Wasik
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0143123572
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 290

Book Description
The most fatal virus known to science, rabies-a disease that spreads avidly from animals to humans-kills nearly one hundred percent of its victims once the infection takes root in the brain. In this critically acclaimed exploration, journalist Bill Wasik and veterinarian Monica Murphy chart four thousand years of the history, science, and cultural mythology of rabies. From Greek myths to zombie flicks, from the laboratory heroics of Louis Pasteur to the contemporary search for a lifesaving treatment, Rabid is a fresh and often wildly entertaining look at one of humankind's oldest and most fearsome foes. "A searing narrative." -The New York Times "In this keen and exceptionally well-written book, rife with surprises, narrative suspense and a steady flow of expansive insights, 'the world's most diabolical virus' conquers the unsuspecting reader's imaginative nervous system. . . . A smart, unsettling, and strangely stirring piece of work." -San Francisco Chronicle "Fascinating. . . . Wasik and Murphy chronicle more than two millennia of myths and discoveries about rabies and the animals that transmit it, including dogs, bats and raccoons." -The Wall Street Journal

An Introduction to Animals and Visual Culture

Author: Randy Malamud
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137009837
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 176

Book Description
How and why do people "frame" animals so pervasively, and what are the ramifications of this habit? For animals, being put into a cultural frame (a film, a website, a pornographic tableau, an advertisement, a cave drawing, a zoo) means being taken out of their natural contexts, leaving them somehow displaced and decontextualized. Human vision of the animal equates to power over the animal. We envision ourselves as monarchs of all we survey, but our dismal record of polluting and destroying vast swaths of nature shows that we are indeed not masters of the ecosphere. A more ethically accurate stance in our relationship to animals should thus challenge the omnipotence of our visual access to them.

Recovering Lost Species in the Modern Age

Author: Dolly Jorgensen
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262537818
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 257

Book Description
A groundbreaking study of how emotions motivate attempts to counter species loss. This groundbreaking book brings together environmental history and the history of emotions to examine the motivations behind species conservation actions. In Recovering Lost Species in the Modern Age, Dolly Jørgensen uses the environmental histories of reintroduction, rewilding, and resurrection to view the modern conservation paradigm of the recovery of nature as an emotionally charged practice. Jørgensen argues that the recovery of nature—identifying that something is lost and then going out to find it and bring it back—is a nostalgic practice that looks to a historical past and relies on the concept of belonging to justify future-oriented action. The recovery impulse depends on emotional responses to what is lost, particularly a longing for recovery that manifests itself in such emotions as guilt, hope, fear, and grief. Jørgensen explains why emotional frameworks matter deeply—both for how people understand nature theoretically and how they interact with it physically. The identification of what belongs (the lost nature) and our longing (the emotional attachment to it) in the present will affect how environmental restoration practices are carried out in the future. A sustainable future will depend on questioning how and why belonging and longing factor into the choices we make about what to recover.

A Cultural History of Climate

Author: Wolfgang Behringer
Publisher: Polity
ISBN: 0745645291
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 312

Book Description
Explores the latest historical research on the development of the earth's climate, showing how even minor changes in the climate could result in major social, political, and religious upheavals.

Beastly Natures

Author: Dorothee Brantz
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 0813929474
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 304

Book Description
Jacket.

A Cultural History of Fairy Tales in the Modern Age

Author: Andrew Teverson
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350287598
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 257

Book Description
How have fairy tales from around the world changed over the centuries? What do they tell us about different cultures and societies? Drawing together contributions from an international range of scholars in history, literature, and cultural studies, this volume uniquely examines creative applications of fairy tales in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It explores how the fairy tale has become a genre that flourishes on film, on TV, and in digital media, as well as in the older technologies of print, performance, and the visual arts. An essential resource for researchers, scholars and students of literature, history, the visual arts and cultural studies, this book explores such themes and topics as: forms of the marvelous, adaptation, gender and sexuality, humans and non-humans, monsters and the monstrous, spaces, socialization, and power. A Cultural History of Fairy Tales (6-volume set) A Cultural History of Fairy Tales in Antiquity is also available as a part of a 6-volume set, A Cultural History of Fairy Tales, tracing fairy tales from antiquity to the present day, available in print, or within a fully-searchable digital library accessible through institutions by annual subscription or on perpetual access (see www.bloomsburyculturalhistory.com). Individual volumes for academics and researchers interested in specific historical periods are also available digitally via www.bloomsburycollections.com.

Bodies of Inscription

Author: Margo DeMello
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822324676
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 260

Book Description
An ethnography of the tattoo community, tracing the practice's transformation from a mostly male, working-class phenomenon to one adapted and propagated by a more middle-class movement in the period from the 1970s to the present.

Animal Characters

Author: Bruce Thomas Boehrer
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812201361
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 246

Book Description
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.