Captivity Literature And The Environment

In his study of captivity narratives, Kyhl Lyndgaard argues that these accounts have influenced land-use policy and environmental attitudes at the same time that they reveal the complex relationship between ethnicity, landscape, and authorship. In connecting these themes, Lyndgaard offers readers an alternative environmental literature, one that is dependent on an understanding of nature as home rather than as a place of temporary retreat. He examines three captivity narratives written in the 1820s and 1830s - A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison, The Captivity and Adventures of John Tanner, and Life of Black Hawk -all of which engage with the Jacksonian policy of Indian removal and resist tropes of the so-called Vanishing Indian. As Lyndgaard shows, the authors and the editors with whom they collaborated often saw their stories as a plea for environmental and social justice. At the same time, audiences have embraced them for their vision of a more inclusive and less exploitative American society than was proffered by the rhetoric of Manifest Destiny. Their legacy is that while environmental and social justice has been slow in fulfilment, their continued popularity testifies to the fact that the struggle for justice has never been ceded.

Environmental enrichment is a simple and effective means of improving animal welfare in any species – companion, farm, laboratory and zoo. For many years, it has been a popular area of research, and has attracted the attention and concerns of animal keepers and carers, animal industry professionals, academics, students and pet owners all over the world. This book is the first to integrate scientific knowledge and principles to show how environmental enrichment can be used on different types of animal. Filling a major gap, it considers the history of animal keeping, legal issues and ethics, right through to a detailed exploration of whether environmental enrichment actually works, the methods involved, and how to design and manage programmes. The first book in a major new animal welfare series Draws together a large amount of research on different animals Provides detailed examples and case studies An invaluable reference tool for all those who work with or study animals in captivity This book is part of the UFAW/Wiley-Blackwell Animal Welfare Book Series. This major series of books produced in collaboration between UFAW (The Universities Federation for Animal Welfare), and Wiley-Blackwell provides an authoritative source of information on worldwide developments, current thinking and best practice in the field of animal welfare science and technology. For details of all of the titles in the series see www.wiley.com/go/ufaw.

Growing recognition of the complexity of animals' physical, social, and psychological lives in the wild has led both zookeepers and the zoo-going public to call for higher environmental standards for animals in captivity. Bringing together the work of animal behaviorists, zoo biologists, and psychologists, Second Nature explores a range of innovative strategies for environmental enrichment in laboratories and marine parks, as well as in zoos. From artificial fleeing-prey devices for leopards to irregular feeding schedules for whales, the practices discussed have resulted in healthier, more relaxed animals that can breed more easily and can exert some control over their environments. Moving beyond the usual studies of primates to consider the requirements of animals as diverse as reptiles, amphibians, marine mammals, small cats, hooved grazers, and bears, contributors argue that whether an animal forages in the wild or plays computer games in captivity, the satisfaction its activity provides—rather than the activity itself—determines the animal's level of physical and psychological well-being. Second Nature also discusses the ways in which environmental enrichment can help zoo-bred animals develop the stamina and adaptability for survival in the wild, and how it can produce healthier lab animals that yield more valid test results. Providing a theoretical framework for the science of environmental enrichment in a variety of settings, the book renews and extends a humane approach to the keeping and conservation of animals.

While Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau are often credited with inventing American environmental writing, Matthew Wynn Sivils argues that the works of these Transcendentalists must be placed within a larger literary tradition that has its origins in early Republic natural histories, Indian captivity narratives, Gothic novels, and juvenile literature. Authors such as William Bartram, Ann Eliza Bleecker, and Samuel Griswold Goodrich, to name just a few, enabled the development of a credibly American brand of proto-environmental fiction. Sivils argues that these seeds of environmental literature would come to fruition in James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pioneers, which he argues is the first uniquely environmental American novel. He then connects the biogeographical politics of Cooper’s The Prairie with European anti-Americanism; and concludes this study by examining how James Kirke Paulding, Thomas Cole, and James Fenimore Cooper imaginatively addressed the problem of human culpability and nationalistic cohesiveness in the face of natural disasters. With their focus on the character and implications of the imagined American landscape, these key works of early environmental thought contributed to the growing influence of the natural environment on the identity of the fledgling nation decades before the influences of Emerson's Nature and Thoreau's Walden.

Christina Rossetti’s Environmental Consciousness takes a cognitive ecocritical approach to Rossetti’s writing as it developed throughout her career. This study provides a unique understanding of Rossetti’s identity as an artist through a cognitive model while also engaging significantly with her spiritual relationship to the nonhuman world. Rossetti was a deliberate and conscious creator who used her writing for therapeutic purposes to create, contemplate, maintain, verify, and, revise her identity. Her understanding of her autobiographical self and her place in the world often comes through observations and poetic treatments of the nonhuman. Rossetti, her speakers, and her characters seek spiritual knowledge in the natural world and share this knowledge with an audience. In nature, Rossetti finds evidence for and guidance from a loving God who offers salvation. Her work places a high value on nature from a Christian perspective that puts conservation over renunciation. She frequently uses strategies that have now been identified by Christian environmentalist such as retrieval, ecojustice, stewardship, and ecological spirituality. With new readings of popular works like "Goblin Market" and "A Birthday," along with treatments of largely neglected works like Verses (1847) and Rossetti’s devotional writings, Christina Rossetti’s Environmental Consciousness offers an understanding of Rossetti’s processes and purposes as a writer and displays new potential for her work in the face of twenty-first-century environmental issues.

Virtually every famous nineteenth-century writer (Harriet Beecher Stowe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson)— and many not so famous—wrote literature for children; many contributed regularly to children’s periodicals, and many entered the field of nature writing, responding to and forwarding the century’s huge social and cultural changes. Appreciating America’s unique natural wonders dovetailed with children’s growth as citizens, but children’s journals often exceeded a pedagogical purpose, intending also to entertain and delight. Though these volumes aimed at a relatively conservative and mostly white, middle-class, and affluent audience, some selections allowed both children and their parents room for imaginative escape from restrictive social norms. Covering a period that initially regarded children’s natural bodies as laboring resources, Stronger, Truer, Bolder traces the shifting pedagogical impulse surrounding nature and the environment through the transformations that included America’s nineteenth century emergence as an industrial power. Karen L. Kilcup shows how children’s literature mirrored those changes in various ways. In its earliest incarnations, it taught children (and their parents) facts about the natural world and about proper behavior vis-à-vis both human and nonhuman others. More significantly, as periodical writing for children advanced, this literature increasingly promoted children’s environmental agency and envisioned their potential influence on concerns ranging from animal rights and interspecies equity to conservation and environmental justice. Such understanding of and engagement with nature not only propelled children toward ethical adulthood but also formed a foundation for responsible American citizenship.

While Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau are often credited with inventing American environmental writing, Matthew Wynn Sivils argues that the works of these Transcendentalists must be placed within a larger literary tradition that has its origins in early Republic natural histories, Indian captivity narratives, Gothic novels, and juvenile literature. Authors such as William Bartram, Ann Eliza Bleecker, and Samuel Griswold Goodrich, to name just a few, enabled the development of a credibly American brand of proto-environmental fiction. Sivils argues that these seeds of environmental literature would come to fruition in James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pioneers, which he argues is the first uniquely environmental American novel. He then connects the biogeographical politics of Cooper’s The Prairie with European anti-Americanism; and concludes this study by examining how James Kirke Paulding, Thomas Cole, and James Fenimore Cooper imaginatively addressed the problem of human culpability and nationalistic cohesiveness in the face of natural disasters. With their focus on the character and implications of the imagined American landscape, these key works of early environmental thought contributed to the growing influence of the natural environment on the identity of the fledgling nation decades before the influences of Emerson's Nature and Thoreau's Walden.

Ecoprecarity: Vulnerable Lives in Literature and Culture presents an examination of ecoprecarity - the precarious lives that humans lead in the process and event of ecological disaster, and the increasing precarious state of the environment itself as a result of human interventions - in contemporary literary-cultural texts. It studies the representation of 'invasion narratives' of the human body and the earth by alien life forms, the ecodystopian vision that informs much environmental thought in popular cultures, the states of ontological integrity and genetic belonging in the age of cloning, xenotransplantation and biotechnology's 'capitalisation' of life itself, and the construction of the 'wild' in these texts. It pays attention to the ecological uncanny and the monstrous that haunts ecodystopias and forms of natureculture that emerge in the bioeconomies since the late twentieth century.