Figuring Animals: Essays on Animal Images in Art, Literature, Philosophy and Popular Culture

Abstract

This is a collection of fifteen essays which expose weaknesses in western epistemological frames of reference that for centuries have limited our views, and, thus, our experiences of animal being, including our own. The volume contributes to current discussions of new ways of seeing the other inhabitants of this world and more effective ways of sharing the world with them. The contributors draw on and complement the growing field of ecocriticism, but because the contributors draw on an array of disciplinary and cultural perspectives, it will appeal to a wide audience, ranging from literary scholars, philosophers, art historians, anthropologists, and cultural historians (including graduate and undergraduate students in all these disciplines), to laypersons interested in nature writing and environmental issues. Table of contents : Front Matter....Pages i-xiii Introduction....Pages 1-17 Front Matter....Pages 19-19 Lost Dog, or, Levinas Faces the Animal....Pages 21-35 Ursus Americanus: The Idea of a Bear....Pages 37-48 Digging and Leveling in Adam’s Garden: Women and the International Cat Fancy....Pages 49-62 Front Matter....Pages 63-63 Animal Testimony in Renaissance Art: Angelic and Other Supernatural Visitations....Pages 65-79 Strange Yet “Familiar”: Cats and Birds in Remedios Varo’s Artistic Universe....Pages 81-97 Who’s Looking? The Animal Gaze in the Fiction of Brigitte Kronauer and Clarice Lispector....Pages 99-118 Front Matter....Pages 119-119 Burning Out the Animal: The Failure of Enlightenment Purification in H. G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau ....Pages 121-134 Ouida’s Rhetoric of Empathy: A Case Study in Victorian Anti-Vivisection Narrative....Pages 135-159 Front Matter....Pages 161-161 The Black Stallion in Print and Film....Pages 163-175 “Who are the Bandar-log?” Questioning Animals in Rudyard Kipling’s Mowgli Stories and Ursula Le Guin’s “Buffalo Gals, Won’t You Come Out Tonight”....Pages 177-194 To the Other: The Animal and Desire in Michael Field’s Whym Chow: Flame of Love ....Pages 195-205 “Identifying with the Animals”: Language, Subjectivity, and the Animal Politics of Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing ....Pages 207-227 Front Matter....Pages 229-229 Sensory Experience as Consciousness in Literary Representations of Animal Minds....Pages 231-246 Human-Animal Affiliation in Modern Popular Film....Pages 247-259 Who May Speak for the Animals? Deep Ecology in Linda Hogan’s Power and A. A. Carr’s Eye Killers ....Pages 261-280 Back Matter....Pages 281-292