Civilized Creatures

Civilized Creatures
Author :
Publisher : JHU Press
Total Pages : 262
Release :
ISBN-10 : 0801880718
ISBN-13 : 9780801880711
Rating : 4/5 (18 Downloads)

Book Synopsis Civilized Creatures by : Jennifer Mason

Download or read book Civilized Creatures written by Jennifer Mason and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2005-08-04 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Civilized Creatures, Jennifer Mason challenges some of our most enduring ideas about how encounters with nonhuman nature shaped American literature and culture. Mason argues that in the second half of the nineteenth century the most powerful influence on Americans' understanding of their affinities with animals was not increasing separation from the pastoral and the wilderness; instead, it was the population's feelings about the ostensibly civilized animals they encountered in their daily lives. Americans of diverse backgrounds, Mason shows, found it attractive as well as politic to imagine themselves as most closely connected to those creatures who shared humans' aptitude for civilized life. And to the minds of many in this period, national prosperity depended less on periodic exposure to untamed, wild nature than it did on the proper care and keeping of such animals within suburban and urban environments. Combining literary analysis with cultural histories of equestrianism, petkeeping, and the animal welfare movement, Civilized Creatures offers new readings of works by Susan Warner, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Charles W. Chesnutt. In each case, Mason demonstrates that understanding contemporary relationships between humans and animals is essential for understanding the debates about gender, race, and cultural power enacted in these texts.


Civilized Creatures Related Books

Civilized Creatures
Language: en
Pages: 262
Authors: Jennifer Mason
Categories: History
Type: BOOK - Published: 2005-08-04 - Publisher: JHU Press

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In Civilized Creatures, Jennifer Mason challenges some of our most enduring ideas about how encounters with nonhuman nature shaped American literature and cultu
Mark Twain’s Book of Animals
Language: en
Pages: 341
Authors: Mark Twain
Categories: Literary Criticism
Type: BOOK - Published: 2009-10-27 - Publisher: Univ of California Press

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Longtime admirers of Mark Twain are aware of how integral animals were to his work as a writer, from his first stories through his final years, including many p
Pet Projects
Language: en
Pages: 180
Authors: Elizabeth Young
Categories: Literary Criticism
Type: BOOK - Published: 2019-12-17 - Publisher: Penn State Press

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

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-p
The Animal and the Daemon in Early China
Language: en
Pages: 388
Authors: Roel Sterckx
Categories: Religion
Type: BOOK - Published: 2012-02-01 - Publisher: State University of New York Press

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Exploring the cultural perception of animals in early Chinese thought, this careful reading of Warring States and Han dynasty writings analyzes how views of ani
Animal Rights
Language: en
Pages: 337
Authors: Lisa Yount
Categories: Juvenile Nonfiction
Type: BOOK - Published: 2007 - Publisher: Infobase Publishing

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Praise for the previous edition: ...an excellent first-stop resource for research on animal rights...well organized, clearly written, and a great starting point