The Horse as Cultural Icon
The Horse as Cultural Icon

Author: Peter Edwards

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2011-10-14

Total Pages: 426

ISBN-13: 9004222421

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In modern Western society horses appear as unexpected visitors: not quite exotic, but not familiar either. This estrangement between humans and horses is a recent one since, until the 1930s, horses were fully present in the everyday world. Indeed, as well as performing utilitarian functions, horses possessed iconic appeal. But, despite the importance of horses, scholars have paid little attention to their lives, roles and meanings. This volume helps to redress the balance. It considers the value that the influential elite placed on horses as essential accompaniments to their way of life and as status symbols, as well as the role that horses played in society as a whole and the people who used and cared for them. Contributors include Greg Bankoff, Pia F. Cuneo, Louise Hill Curth, Amanda Eisemann, Jennifer Flaherty, Ian F. MacInnes, Richard Nash, Gavin Robinson, Elizabeth Anne Socolow, Sandra Swart, Elizabeth M. Tobey, Andrea Tonni, and Elaine Walker.

Victorian Fiction and the Cult of the Horse
Victorian Fiction and the Cult of the Horse

Author: Gina M. Dorré

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-12-05

Total Pages: 292

ISBN-13: 1351875892

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The horse was essential to the workings of Victorian society, and its representations, which are vast, ranging, and often contradictory, comprise a vibrant cult of the horse. Examining the representational, emblematic, and rhetorical uses of horses in a diversity of nineteenth-century texts, Gina M. Dorré shows how discourses about horses reveal and negotiate anxieties related to industrialism and technology, constructions of gender and sexuality, ruptures in the social fabric caused by class conflict and mobility, and changes occasioned by national "progress" and imperial expansion. She argues that as a cultural object, the horse functions as a repository of desire and despair in a society rocked by astonishing social, economic, and technological shifts. While representations of horses abound in Victorian fiction, Gina M. Dorré's study focuses on those novels by Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Braddon, Anna Sewell, and George Moore that engage with the most impassioned controversies concerning horses and horse-care, such as the introduction of the steam engine, popular new methods of horse-taming, debates over the tight-reining of horses, and the moral furor surrounding gambling at the race track. Her book establishes the centrality of the horse as a Victorian cultural icon and explores how through it, dominant ideologies of gender and class are created, promoted, and disrupted.

Equestrian Cultures
Equestrian Cultures

Author: Kristen Guest

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2019-01-11

Total Pages: 283

ISBN-13: 022658951X

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As much as dogs, cats, or any domestic animal, horses exemplify the vast range of human-animal interactions. Horses have long been deployed to help with a variety of human activities—from racing and riding to police work, farming, warfare, and therapy—and have figured heavily in the history of natural sciences, social sciences, and the humanities. Most accounts of the equine-human relationship, however, fail to address the last few centuries of Western history, focusing instead on pre-1700 interactions. Equestrian Cultures fills in the gap, telling the story of how prominently horses continue to figure in our lives, up to the present day. ​ Kristen Guest and Monica Mattfeld place the modern period front and center in this collection, illuminating the largely untold story of how the horse has responded to the accelerated pace of modernity. The book’s contributors explore equine cultures across the globe, drawing from numerous interdisciplinary sources to show how horses have unexpectedly influenced such distinctively modern fields as photography, anthropology, and feminist theory. Equestrian Cultures boldly steps forward to redefine our view of the most recent developments in our long history of equine partnership and sets the course for future examinations of this still-strong bond.

The Construction and Dynamics of Cultural Icons
The Construction and Dynamics of Cultural Icons

Author: Erica van Boven

Publisher:

Published: 2021-05-05

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 9789463728225

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" Topical theme: the volume connects the study of cultural icons to pressing questions on the role of icons and the iconic in present day society. " Innovative and compelling comparative approach that offers a new synthesis of the study of cultural icons so far by focusing both on the construction processes and the dynamics of cultural icons. " The volume brings together scholars from art history, film studies, literature and cultural history in a joint reflection on the study of cultural icons and their role in shaping cultural memory.

The Horse in Human History
The Horse in Human History

Author: Pita Kelekna

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2009-04-20

Total Pages: 461

ISBN-13: 0521516595

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This book assesses the impact of the horse on human society from 4000 BC to 2000 AD, by first describing initial horse domestication on the Pontic-Caspian steppes and the early development of driving and riding technologies. It traces the radiation of newly mobile equestrian cultures across Europe, Asia, and North Africa. It then documents the transmission of steppe chariotry and cavalry to sedentary states, the high economic importance of the horse, and the socio-political evolution of equestrian empires, which from antiquity into the modern era expanded across continents.

Horse People
Horse People

Author: Rebecca Cassidy

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 2007-12

Total Pages: 225

ISBN-13: 0801887038

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Cassidy's investigation reveals the factors--ethical, cultural, political, and economic--that have shaped the racing tradition.

Indian Horse
Indian Horse

Author: Richard Wagamese

Publisher: Milkweed Editions

Published: 2018-04-10

Total Pages: 158

ISBN-13: 1571319883

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A First Nations former hockey star looks back on his life as he undergoes treatment for alcoholism in this novel from the author of Dream Wheels. Saul Indian Horse is a child when his family retreats into the woods. Among the lakes and the cedars, they attempt to reconnect with half-forgotten traditions and hide from the authorities who have been kidnapping Ojibway youth. But when winter approaches, Saul loses everything: his brother, his parents, his beloved grandmother—and then his home itself. Alone in the world and placed in a horrific boarding school, Saul is surrounded by violence and cruelty. At the urging of a priest, he finds a tentative salvation in hockey. Rising at dawn to practice alone, Saul proves determined and undeniably gifted. His intuition and vision are unmatched. His speed is remarkable. Together they open doors for him: away from the school, into an all-Ojibway amateur circuit, and finally within grasp of a professional career. Yet as Saul’s victories mount, so do the indignities and the taunts, the racism and the hatred—the harshness of a world that will never welcome him, tied inexorably to the sport he loves. Spare and compact yet undeniably rich, Indian Horse is at once a heartbreaking account of a dark chapter in our history and a moving coming-of-age story. “Shocking and alien, valuable and true… A master of empathy.”—Jane Smiley, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Golden Age “A severe yet beautiful novel…. Indian Horse finds the granite solidity of Wagamese’s prose polished to a lustrous sheen; brisk, brief, sharp chapters propel the reader forward.”—Donna Bailey Nurse, National Post (Toronto)

The Last Dinosaur Book
The Last Dinosaur Book

Author: W. J. T. Mitchell

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 1998

Total Pages: 106

ISBN-13: 9780226532042

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Mitchell shows why we are so attached to the myth and the reality of the "terrible lizards.".

Animals and Early Modern Identity
Animals and Early Modern Identity

Author: PiaF. Cuneo

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-07-05

Total Pages: 427

ISBN-13: 1351576437

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Animals were everywhere in the early modern period and they impacted, at least in some way, the lives of every kind of early modern person, from the humblest peasant to the greatest prince. Artists made careers based on depicting them. English gentry impoverished themselves spending money on them. Humanists exercised their scholarship writing about them. Pastors saved souls delivering sermons on them. Nobles forged alliances competing with them. Foreigners and indigenes negotiated with one another through trading them. The nexus between animal-human relationships and early modern identity is illuminated in this volume by the latest research of international scholars working on the history of art, literature, and of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Germany, France, England, Spain, and South Africa. Collectively, these essays investigate how animals - horses, dogs, pigs, hogs, fish, cattle, sheep, birds, rhinoceroses, even sea-monsters and other creatures - served people in Europe, England, the Americas, and Africa to defend, contest or transcend the boundaries of early modern identities. Developments in the methodologies employed by scholars to interrogate the past have opened up an intellectual and discursive space for - and a concomitant recognition of - the study of animals as a topic that significantly elucidates past and present histories. Relevant to a considerable array of disciplines, the study of animals also provides a means to surmount traditional disciplinary boundaries through processes of dynamic interchange and cross-fertilization.

Becoming Centaur
Becoming Centaur

Author: Monica Mattfeld

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published: 2017-03-21

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 027107972X

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In this study of the relationship between men and their horses in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England, Monica Mattfeld explores the experience of horsemanship and how it defined one’s gendered and political positions within society. Men of the period used horses to transform themselves, via the image of the centaur, into something other—something powerful, awe-inspiring, and mythical. Focusing on the manuals, memoirs, satires, images, and ephemera produced by some of the period’s most influential equestrians, Mattfeld examines how the concepts and practices of horse husbandry evolved in relation to social, cultural, and political life. She looks closely at the role of horses in the world of Thomas Hobbes and William Cavendish; the changes in human social behavior and horse handling ushered in by elite riding houses such as Angelo’s Academy and Mr. Carter’s; and the public perception of equestrian endeavors, from performances at places such as Astley’s Amphitheatre to the satire of Henry William Bunbury. Throughout, Mattfeld shows how horses aided the performance of idealized masculinity among communities of riders, in turn influencing how men were perceived in regard to status, reputation, and gender. Drawing on human-animal studies, gender studies, and historical studies, Becoming Centaur offers a new account of masculinity that reaches beyond anthropocentrism to consider the role of animals in shaping man.