Exotic animals were coveted commodities in nineteenth-century Britain. Spectators flocked to zoos and menageries to see female lion tamers and hungry hippos. Helen Cowie examines zoos and travelling menageries in the period 1800-1880, using animal exhibitions to examine issues of class, gender, imperial culture and animal welfare.
Exotic animals were coveted commodities in nineteenth-century Britain. Spectators flocked to zoos and menageries to see female lion tamers and hungry hippos. Helen Cowie examines zoos and travelling menageries in the period 1800-1880, using animal exhibitions to examine issues of class, gender, imperial culture and animal welfare.
This book explores the British animal defense movement’s mobilization of the cultural and intellectual traditions of its time- from Christianity and literature, to natural history, evolutionism and political radicalism- in its struggle for the cause of animals in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Each chapter examines the process whereby the animal protection movement interpreted and drew upon varied intellectual, moral and cultural resources in order to achieve its manifold objectives, participate in the ongoing re-creation of the current traditions of thought, and re-shape human-animal relations in wider society. Placing at its center of analysis the movement’s mediating power in relation to its surrounding traditions, Li’s original perspective uncovers the oft-ignored cultural work of the movement whilst restoring its agency in explaining social change. Looking forward, it points at the same time to the potential of all traditions, through ongoing mobilization, to effect change in the human-animal relations of the future.
The Hispanic and Anglo worlds are often portrayed as the Cain and Abel of Western culture, antagonistic and alien to each other. This book challenges such view with a new critical conceptual framework – the ‘Hispanic-Anglosphere’ – to open a window into the often surprising interactions of individuals, transnational networks and global communities that, it argues, made of the British Isles (England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man) a crucial hub for the global Hispanic world, a launching-pad and a bridge between Spanish Europe, Africa, America and Asia in the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries. Perhaps not unlike today, that was a time marked by social uncertainty, pandemics, the dislocation of global polities and the rise of radicalisms. The volume offers insights on many themes including trade, the arts, education, language, politics, the press, religion, biodiversity, philanthropy, anti-slavery and imperialism. Established academics and rising stars from different continents and disciplines combined original, primary research with a wide range of secondary sources to produce a rich collection of ten case-studies, 25 biographies and seven samples of interpreted material culture, all presented in an accessible style appealing to scholars, students and the general reader alike. Chapters Introduction; Chapter 1 (Section 1); Chapter 5 (Section 1); Section II; Afterword) of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND)] 4.0 license.
This book is open access and available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. It is funded by Knowledge Unlatched. Animals are increasingly recognized as fit and proper subjects for historians, yet their place in conventional historical narratives remains contested. This volume argues for a history of animals based on the centrality of liminality - the state of being on the threshold, not quite one thing yet not quite another. Since animals stand between nature and culture, wildness and domestication, the countryside and the city, and tradition and modernity, the concept of liminality has a special resonance for historical animal studies. Assembling an impressive cast of contributors, this volume employs liminality as a lens through which to study the social and cultural history of animals in the modern city. It includes a variety of case studies, such as the horse-human relationship in the towns of New Spain, hunting practices in 17th-century France, the birth of the zoo in Germany and the role of the stray dog in the Victorian city, demonstrating the interrelated nature of animal and human histories. Animal History in the Modern City is a vital resource for scholars and students interested in animal studies, urban history and historical geography.
This book, Victorians and Their Animals: Beast on a Leash, investigates the notion that British Victorians did see themselves as naturally dominant species over other humans and over animals. They conscientiously, hegemonically were determined to rule those beneath them and the animal within themselves albeit with varying degrees of success and failure. The articles in this collection apply posthuman and other theories, including queer, postcolonialism, deconstruction, and Marxism, in their exploration of Victorian attitudes toward animals. They study the biopolitical relationships between human and nonhuman animals in several key Victorian literary works. Some of this book’s chapters deal with animal ethics and moral aesthetics. Also being studied is the representation of animals in several Victorian novels as narrative devices to signify class status and gender dynamics, either to iterate socially acceptable mores or to satirize hypocrisy or breach of behavior or to voice social protest. All of the chapters analyse the interdependence of people and animals during the nineteenth century.
What were the cultural factors that held the British world together? How was Britishness understood at home, in the Empire, and in areas of informal British influence? This book makes the case for a ‘cultural British world’, and examines how it took shape in a wide range of locations, ranging from India to Jamaica, from Sierra Leone to Australia, and from south China to New Zealand. These eleven original essays explore a wide range of topics, including images of nakedness, humanitarianism, anti-slavery, literary criticism, travel narratives, legal cultures, visions of capitalism, and household possessions. The book argues that the debates around these issues, as well as the consumer culture associated with them, helped give the British world a sense of cohesion and identity. This book will be essential reading for historians of imperialism and globalisation, and includes contributions from some of the most prominent historians of British imperial and cultural history.
This book coins the term ‘imperial beast fable’ to explore modern forms of human-animal relationships and their origins in the British Empire. Taking as a starting point the long nineteenth-century fascination with non-European beast fables, it examines literary reworkings of these fables, such as Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Books, in relation to the global politics of race, language, and species. The imperial beast fable figures variably as a key site where the nature and origins of mankind are hotly debated; an emerging space of conservation in which humans enclose animals to manage and control them; a cage in which an animal narrator talks to change its human jailors; and a vision of animal cosmopolitanism, in which a close kinship between humans and other animals is dreamt of. Written at the intersection of animal studies and postcolonial studies, this book proposes that the beast fable embodies the ideologies and values of the British Empire, while also covertly critiquing them. It therefore finds in the beast fable the possibility that the multitudinous animals it gives voice to might challenge the imperial networks which threaten their existence, both in the nineteenth century and today.