Animal Novels Bird Slaves

"Considered a seminal book in the fields of Bioethics and Human-Animal Studies, and a classic in the field of humane thought, Marjorie Spiegel's The Dreaded Comparison makes a significant contribution to our efforts to understand the roots of individual and societal violence, tying current cultural practices to the legacy of human bondage, and introducing new and diverse audiences to the history of slavery and institutionalized racism in the United States. Spanning history, psychology, and current events-- and ground-breaking for its thesis which presents the first in-depth exploration of the similarities between the violence humans have wrought against other humans, and our culture's treatment of non-human animals-- The Dreaded Comparison has contributed to subsequent explorations by other scholars, historians, legal scholars, law professors and educators in diverse fields to view and further define the modern system of animal exploitation in terms of the model and legacy of human slavery."-- Amazon.

The book that Entertainment Weekly called "hilarious," Publishers Weekly declared "a true pleasure," Booklist called "heartwarming," and the Dallas Morning News praised as "rich and funny" is now available in paperback. When Bob Tarte bought a house in rural Michigan, he was counting on a tranquil haven. Then Bob married Linda. She wanted a rabbit, which seemed innocuous enough until the bunny chewed through their electrical wiring. And that was just the beginning. Before long, Bob found himself constructing cages, buying feed, clearing duck waste, and spoon-feeding a menagerie of furry and feathery residents. His life of quiet serenity vanished, and he unwittingly became a servant to a relentlessly demanding family. "They dumbfounded him, controlled and teased him, took their share of his flesh, stole his heart" (Kirkus Reviews). Whether commiserating with Bob over the fate of those who are slaves to their animals or regarding his story as a cautionary tale about the rigors of animal ownership, readers on both sides of the fence have found Tarte's story of his chaotic squawking household irresistible--and irresistibly funny.

In Pet Projects, Elizabeth Young joins an analysis of the representation of animals in nineteenth-century fiction, taxidermy, and the visual arts with a first-person reflection on her own scholarly journey. Centering on Margaret Marshall Saunders, a Canadian woman writer once famous for her animal novels, and incorporating Young’s own experience of a beloved animal’s illness, this study highlights the personal and intellectual stakes of a “pet project” of cultural criticism. Young assembles a broad archive of materials, beginning with Saunders’s novels and widening outward to include fiction, nonfiction, photography, and taxidermy. She coins the term “first-dog voice” to describe the narrative technique of novels, such as Saunders’s Beautiful Joe, written in the first person from the perspective of an animal. She connects this voice to contemporary political issues, revealing how animal fiction such as Saunders’s reanimates nineteenth-century writing about both feminism and slavery. Highlighting the prominence of taxidermy in the late nineteenth century, she suggests that Saunders transforms taxidermic techniques in surprising ways that provide new forms of authority for women. Young adapts Freud to analyze literary representations of mourning by and for animals, and she examines how Canadian writers, including Saunders, use animals to explore race, ethnicity, and national identity. Her wide-ranging investigation incorporates twenty-first as well as nineteenth-century works of literature and culture, including recent art using taxidermy and contemporary film. Throughout, she reflects on the tools she uses to craft her analyses, examining the state of scholarly fields from feminist criticism to animal studies. With a lively, first-person voice that highlights experiences usually concealed in academic studies by scholarly discourse—such as detours, zigzags, roadblocks, and personal experience—this unique and innovative book will delight animal enthusiasts and academics in the fields of animal studies, gender studies, American studies, and Canadian studies.

This volume offers the first comprehensive treatment of how the five canonical Greek novels represent slaves and slavery. In each novel, one or both elite protagonists are enslaved, and Owens explores the significance of the genre’s regular social degradation of these members of the elite. Reading the novels in the context of social attitudes and stereotypes about slaves, Owens argues for an ideological division within the genre: the earlier novelists, Xenophon of Ephesus and Chariton, challenge and undermine elite stereotypes; the three later novelists, Longus, Achilles Tatius, and Heliodorus, affirm them. The critique of elite thinking about slavery in Xenophon and Chariton opens the possibility that these earlier authors and their readers included literate ex-slaves. The interests and needs of these authors and their readers shaped the emerging genre and not only made the protagonists’ slavery a key motif but also made slavery itself a theme that helped define the genre. The Representation of Slavery in the Greek Novel will be of interest not only to students of the ancient novel but also to anyone working on slavery in the ancient world.

""Adds a new dimension to our understanding of eighteenth-century France by investigating the provenance, treatment, and fate of exotic animals living in Paris in the 1700s."" -- American Historical Review.

Contributors: Madeleine Brainerd, Joe Conway, Fraser Easton, Christopher GoGwilt, Shari Goldberg, Melanie D. Holm, Sarah Kay, Kaori T. Kitao, Holt V. Meyer, Isabel A. Moore, Fawzia Mustafa, Gavin Sourgen.​ Mocking Bird Technologies brings together a range of perspectives to offer an extended meditation on bird mimicry in literature: the way birds mimic humans, the way humans mimic birds, and the way mimicry of any kind involves technologies that extend across as well as beyond languages and species. The essays examine the historical, poetic, and semiotic problem of mimesis exemplified both by the imitative behavior of parrots, starlings, and other mocking birds, and by the poetic trope of such birds in a range of literary and philological traditions. Drawing from a cross-section of traditional periods and fields in literary studies (18th-century studies, romantic studies, early American studies, 20th-century studies, and postcolonial studies), the collection offers new models for combining comparative and global studies of literature and culture. Editors Christopher GoGwilt is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Fordham University. He is the author of The Passage of Literature: Genealogies of Modernism in Conrad, Rhys, and Pramoedya (Oxford, 2011), The Fiction of Geopolitics: Afterimages of Culture from Wilkie Collins to Alfred Hitchcock (Stanford, 2000), and The Invention of the West: Joseph Conrad and the Double-Mapping of Europe and Empire (Stanford, 1995). Melanie D. Holm is Assistant Professor of the English Department and Graduate Program of Literature and Criticism at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. She also teaches in the university’s Women’s and Gender Studies program. Her scholarly focus is on eighteenth-century literature and skepticism. Contributors Madeleine Brainerd taught at Washington University in St. Louis and at Excelsior College. Since 2004 she has taught therapeutic yoga and medical qi gong in New York City, at the Integral Yoga Institute, Kenshikai Dojo, Gouverneur Hospital, and other venues. She studies histories of yoga’s intersections with ecological in/justice, animality, and affect theory. Joe Conway is an Assistant Professor of American Literature at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. His articles have appeared or are scheduled to appear in the journals Women’s Studies, Early American Literature, and Nineteenth-Century Contexts. He is currently at work on a monograph about the social life of antebellum money that charts how discourses of noneconomic phenomena such as medicine, race, nationalism, and aesthetics informed nineteenth-century debates about what constitutes good money. Fraser Easton is Associate Professor of English, University of Waterloo, Canada. A specialist in eighteenth-century literature, he has published on Jane Austen, Daniel Defoe, Maria Edgeworth, and Christopher Smart, as well as on newspaper records and historical accounts of passing women in the eighteenth century. Shari Goldberg is Assistant Professor of English at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. She is the author of Quiet Testimony: A Theory of Witnessing from Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Fordham, 2013). She has also published essays on silence, politics, and personhood in American literature. Her current research focuses on late-nineteenth-century models of mind and person in narrative and psychological writing. Sarah Kay teaches French and Medieval Studies at New York University. She has written widely on medieval literature across languages, genres, and periods; her work combines the study of medieval texts, especially troubadour songs, with philosophical and theoretical inquiry. Her two most recent books are Parrots and Nightingales: Troubadour Quotations and the Development of European Poetry (2013) and Animal Skins and the Reading Self in Medieval Latin and French Bestiaries (2017). Kaori Kitao (William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Art History, Emerita, Swarthmore College) taught art history at Swarthmore College from 1966 to 2001. She was born in Tokyo and studied architecture at UC Berkeley and art history at Harvard. Her main specialization is Italian renaissance and baroque art; she has also taught courses in cinema history, material culture, urban studies, and Japanese architecture. Holt V. Meyer is Professor of Slavic Studies at Erfurt University. He is the author of Romantische Orientierung (1995) and numerous articles and has co-edited the collections Juden und Judentum in Literatur und Film des slavischen Sprachraumes. Die geniale Epoche (1999), Inventing Slavia (2005), Schiller: Gedenken—Vergessen—Lesen (2010), and Gagarin als Archivkörper und Erinnerungsfigur (2014). He is co-editor of the new book series Spatio-Temporality. Practices—Concepts— Media (De Gruyter). He is currently working on a book about the official Stalinist Pushkin celebrations of 1949. Isabel (Annie) Moore completed her Ph.D. in comparative literature at the University of California–Irvine. From 2011 to 2013, she held a postdoctoral fellowship in English at the University of Victoria. She has published on Contemporary Irish and Canadian poetry, and her book project is titled The Ends of Lyric Life: A Theory of Biopoetics. Fawzia Mustafa is Professor of English and African and African American Studies at Fordham University. She also teaches in the university’s Comparative Literature and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies Programs. The author of V. S. Naipaul (1995), she has published numerous articles on postcolonial literature and development. Gavin Sourgen is Visiting Assistant Professor of English at the Harriet L. Wilkes Honors College of Florida Atlantic University. He completed his D.Phil. at Balliol College (Oxford) in 2013, concentrating on the transitional poetics of Lord Byron’s verse, and has published on Byron, Coleridge, and romantic aesthetics in general.