Download or read book The Beast in the Boudoir written by Kathleen Kete and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2022-07-15 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kathleen Kete's wise and witty examination of petkeeping in nineteenth-century Paris provides a unique window through which to view the lives of ordinary French people. She demonstrates how that cliché of modern life, the family dog, reveals the tensions that modernity created for the Parisian bourgeoisie. Kete's study draws on a range of literary and archival sources, from dog-care books to veterinarians's records to Dumas's musings on his cat. The fad for aquariums, attitudes toward vivisection, the dread of rabies, the development of dog breeding—all are shown to reflect the ways middle-class people thought about their lives. Petkeeping, says Kete, was a way to imagine a better, more manageable version of the world—it relieved the pressures of contemporary life and improvised solutions to the intractable mesh that was post-Enlightenment France. The faithful, affectionate family dog became a counterpoint to the isolation of individualism and lack of community in urban life. By century's end, however, animals no longer represented the human condition with such potency, and even the irascible, autonomous cat had been rehabilitated into a creature of fidelity and affection. Full of fascinating details, this innovative book will contribute to the way we understand culture and the creation of class. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1994.
Download or read book Empire of Sacrifice written by Jon Pahl and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2012-06 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is widely recognized that American culture is both exceptionally religious and exceptionally violent. Americans participate in religious communities in high numbers, yet American citizens also own guns at rates far beyond those of citizens in other industrialized nations. Since 9/11, United States scholars have understandably discussed religious violence in terms of terrorist acts, a focus that follows United States policy. Yet, according to Jon Pahl, to identify religious violence only with terrorism fails to address the long history of American violence rooted in religion throughout the country’s history. In essence, Americans have found ways to consider blessed some very brutal attitudes and behaviors both domestically and globally. In Empire of Sacrifice, Pahl explains how both of these distinctive features of American culture work together by exploring how constructions along the lines of age, race, and gender have operated to centralize cultural power across American civil or cultural religions in ways that don’t always appear to be "religious" at all. Pahl traces the development of these forms of systemic violence throughout American history, using evidence from popular culture, including movies such as Rebel without a Cause and Reefer Madness and works of literature such as The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass and The Handmaid's Tale, to illuminate historical events. Throughout, Pahl focuses an intense light on the complex and durable interactions between religion and violence in American history, from Puritan Boston to George W. Bush’s Baghdad.
Download or read book Dog s Best Friend written by Mark Derr and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2004-04 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comprehensive, humane, and bemused tour of the dog-human relationship, Dog's Best Friend combines anecdote, research, and reportage to illuminate our complex rapport with our cherished canine companions. Tracking our national obsession with an animal that now outnumbers children in American households, Mark Derr chronicles the evolution of "the culture of the dog" from the prehistoric domestication of tamed wolves to the modern horrors of overbreeding and inbreeding. Passionate about his subject and intent on sharing his zeal, Derr defends dogs with wit and flare, producing here a quirky, informative, and fitting tribute to our love affair with canines big and small.
Download or read book Herstories on Screen written by Kathleen Cummins and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2020-05-19 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the late 1970s into the early 1990s, a generation of female filmmakers took aim at their home countries’ popular myths of the frontier. Deeply influenced by second-wave feminism and supported by hard-won access to governmental and institutional funding and training, their trailblazing films challenged traditionally male genres like the Western. Instead of reinforcing the myths of nationhood often portrayed in such films—invariably featuring a lone white male hero pitted against the “savage” and “uncivilized” native terrain—these filmmakers constructed counternarratives centering on women and marginalized communities. In place of rugged cowboys violently removing indigenous peoples to make the frontier safe for their virtuous wives and daughters, these filmmakers told the stories of colonial and postcolonial societies from a female and/or subaltern point of view. Herstories on Screen is a transnational study of feature narrative films from Australia, Canada, the United States, and New Zealand/Aotearoa that deconstruct settler-colonial myths. Kathleen Cummins offers in-depth readings of ten works by a diverse range of women filmmakers including Jane Campion, Julie Dash, Merata Mita, Tracey Moffatt, and Anne Wheeler. She reveals how they skillfully deploy genre tropes and popular storytelling conventions in order to critique master narratives of feminine domesticity and purity and depict women and subaltern people performing acts of agency and resistance. Cummins details the ways in which second-wave feminist theory and aesthetics informed these filmmakers’ efforts to debunk idealized Anglo-Saxon femininity and motherhood and lay bare gendered and sexual violence and colonial oppression.
Download or read book The Nature of the Beasts written by Ian Jared Miller and published by University of California Press. This book was released on 2021-01-05 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is widely known that such Western institutions as the museum, the university, and the penitentiary shaped Japan’s emergence as a modern nation-state. Less commonly recognized is the role played by the distinctly hybrid institution—at once museum, laboratory, and prison—of the zoological garden. In this eye-opening study of Japan’s first modern zoo, Tokyo’s Ueno Imperial Zoological Gardens, opened in 1882, Ian Jared Miller offers a refreshingly unconventional narrative of Japan’s rapid modernization and changing relationship with the natural world. As the first zoological garden in the world not built under the sway of a Western imperial regime, the Ueno Zoo served not only as a staple attraction in the nation’s capital—an institutional marker of national accomplishment—but also as a site for the propagation of a new “natural” order that was scientifically verifiable and evolutionarily foreordained. As the Japanese empire grew, Ueno became one of the primary sites of imperialist spectacle, a microcosm of the empire that could be traveled in the course of a single day. The meaning of the zoo would change over the course of Imperial Japan’s unraveling and subsequent Allied occupation. Today it remains one of Japan’s most frequently visited places. But instead of empire in its classic political sense, it now bespeaks the ambivalent dominion of the human species over the natural environment, harkening back to its imperial roots even as it asks us to question our exploitation of the planet’s resources.
Download or read book Looking at Animals in Human History written by Linda Kalof and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2007-08-15 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the first cave paintings to Britta Jaschinski's provocative animal photography, it seems we have been describing and portraying animals, in some form or another, for as long as we have been human. This book provides a broad historical overview of our representations of animals, from prehistory to postmodernity, and how those representations have altered with changing social conditions. Taking in a wide range of visual and textual materials, Linda Kalof unearths many surprising and revealing examples of our depictions of animals. She also examines animals in a broad sweep of literature, narrative and criticism: from Pliny the Elder’s Natural History to Donna Haraway’s writings on animal–human–machine interaction; and from accounts of the Black Plague and histories of the domestic animal and zoos, to the ways that animal stereotypes have been applied to people to highlight hierarchies of gender, race and class. Well-researched and scholarly, yet very accessible, this book is a significant contribution to the human–animal story. Featuring more than 60 images, Looking at Animals in Human History brings together a wealth of information that will appeal to the wide audience interested in animals, as well as to specialists in many disciplines. Linda Kalof is professor of sociology at Michigan State University. Her books include The Earthscan Reader in Environmental Values and The Animals Reader: The Essential Classic and Contemporary Writings.
Download or read book Filthy Fictions written by Monica Chiu and published by Rowman Altamira. This book was released on 2004 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Filthy Fictions addresses Asian American literature by women to explore and explode the sedimented and solidified meanings we have created about 'Asian American' and 'dirt' through dialogues that not only cross disciplinary and institutional formations and borders, but also question the very borders and territories upon which these arguments may be founded. Expertly questioning the construction of the ethnic body, the book discusses critical discourses in ethnic and feminist studies around the topic of identity (re)production and transnational representation.
Download or read book Teaching the Animal written by Margo DeMello and published by Lantern Books. This book was released on 2010 with total page 465 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Split into three sections, Teaching the Animal provides in-depth analysis of the nature of the discipline, the resources available, expectations of students and faculty, and a number of sample curricula in the fields of humanities, social sciences, and the natural sciences.
Download or read book Beasts of the Earth written by E. Fuller Torrey and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2005-02-03 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Humans have lived in close proximity to other animals for thousands of years. Recent scientific studies have even shown that the presence of animals has a positive effect on our physical and mental health. People with pets typically have lower blood pressure, show fewer symptoms of depression, and tend to get more exercise. But there is a darker side to the relationship between animals and humans. Animals are carriers of harmful infectious agents and the source of a myriad of human diseases. In recent years, the emergence of high-profile illnesses such as AIDS, SARS, West Nile virus, and bird flu has drawn much public attention, but as E. Fuller Torrey and Robert H. Yolken reveal, the transfer of deadly microbes from animals to humans is neither a new nor an easily avoided problem. Beginning with the domestication of farm animals nearly 10,000 years ago, Beasts of the Earth traces the ways that human-animal contact has evolved over time. Today, shared living quarters, overlapping ecosystems, and experimental surgical practices where organs or tissues are transplanted from non-humans into humans continue to open new avenues for the transmission of infectious agents. Other changes in human behavior like increased air travel, automated food processing, and threats of bioterrorism are increasing the contagion factor by transporting microbes further distances and to larger populations in virtually no time at all. While the authors urge that a better understanding of past diseases may help us lessen the severity of some illnesses, they also warn that, given our increasingly crowded planet, it is not a question of if but when and how often animal-transmitted diseases will pose serious challenges to human health in the future.
Download or read book Renaissance Beasts written by Erica Fudge and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2010-10-01 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Animals, as Lévi-Strauss wrote, are good to think with. This collection addresses and reassesses the variety of ways in which animals were used and thought about in Renaissance culture, challenging contemporary as well as historic views of the boundaries and hierarchies humans presume the natural world to contain. Taking as its starting point the popularity of speaking animals in sixteenth-century literature and ending with the decline of the imperial Ménagerie during the French Revolution, Renaissance Beasts uses the lens of human-animal relationships to view issues as diverse as human status and power, diet, civilization and the political life, religion and anthropocentrism, spectacle and entertainment, language, science and skepticism, and domestic and courtly cultures. Within these pages scholars from a variety of disciplines discuss numerous kinds of texts--literary, dramatic, philosophical, religious, political--by writers including Calvin, Montaigne, Sidney, Shakespeare, Descartes, Boyle, and Locke. Through analysis of these and other writers, Renaissance Beasts uncovers new and arresting interpretations of Renaissance culture and the broader social assumptions glimpsed through views on matters such as pet ownership and meat consumption. Renaissance Beasts is certainly about animals, but of the many species discussed, it is ultimately humankind that comes under the greatest scrutiny.
Download or read book The Dread of Difference written by Barry Keith Grant and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2015-04-01 with total page 558 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “The Dread of Difference is a classic. Few film studies texts have been so widely read and so influential. It’s rarely on the shelf at my university library, so continuously does it circulate. Now this new edition expands the already comprehensive coverage of gender in the horror film with new essays on recent developments such as the Hostel series and torture porn. Informative and enlightening, this updated classic is an essential reference for fans and students of horror movies.”—Stephen Prince, editor of The Horror Film and author of Digital Visual Effects in Cinema: The Seduction of Reality “An impressive array of distinguished scholars . . . gazes deeply into the darkness and then forms a Dionysian chorus reaffirming that sexuality and the monstrous are indeed mated in many horror films.”—Choice “An extremely useful introduction to recent thinking about gender issues within this genre.”—Film Theory
Download or read book Handbook of Historical Animal Studies written by Mieke Roscher and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2021-06-08 with total page 647 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Rabid written by Bill Wasik and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2012-07-19 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The most fatal virus known to science, rabies-a disease that spreads avidly from animals to humans-kills nearly one hundred percent of its victims once the infection takes root in the brain. In this critically acclaimed exploration from the authors of Our Kindred Creatures, journalist Bill Wasik and veterinarian Monica Murphy chart four thousand years of the history, science, and cultural mythology of rabies. From Greek myths to zombie flicks, from the laboratory heroics of Louis Pasteur to the contemporary search for a lifesaving treatment, Rabid is a fresh and often wildly entertaining look at one of humankind's oldest and most fearsome foes. "A searing narrative." -The New York Times "In this keen and exceptionally well-written book, rife with surprises, narrative suspense and a steady flow of expansive insights, 'the world's most diabolical virus' conquers the unsuspecting reader's imaginative nervous system. . . . A smart, unsettling, and strangely stirring piece of work." -San Francisco Chronicle "Fascinating. . . . Wasik and Murphy chronicle more than two millennia of myths and discoveries about rabies and the animals that transmit it, including dogs, bats and raccoons." -The Wall Street Journal
Download or read book The Life of the City written by Julian Brigstocke and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-03 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Could the vitality of embodied experience create a foundation for a new form of revolutionary authority? The Life of the City is a bold and innovative reassessment of the early urban avant-garde movements that sought to re-imagine and reinvent the experiential life of the city. Constructing a ground-breaking theoretical analysis of the relationships between biological life, urban culture, and modern forms of biopolitical ’experiential authority’, Julian Brigstocke traces the failed attempts of Parisian radicals to turn the ’crisis of authority’ in late nineteenth-century Paris into an opportunity to invent new forms of urban commons. The most comprehensive account to date of the spatial politics of the literary, artistic and anarchist groups that settled in the Montmartre area of Paris after the suppression of the 1871 Paris Commune, The Life of the City analyses the reasons why laughter emerged as the unlikely tool through which Parisian bohemians attempted to forge a new, non-representational biopolitics of sensation. Ranging from the carnivalesque performances of artistic cabarets such as the Chat Noir to the laughing violence of anarchist terrorism, The Life of the City is a timely analysis of the birth of a carnivalesque politics that remains highly influential in contemporary urban movements.
Download or read book Fetish Style written by Frenchy Lunning and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2013-04-11 with total page 171 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fetish Style traces the history, forms and tendencies of fetish fashions popular in both mainstream and subcultural fashion.
Download or read book Remembrance of a Restaurant written by Frank Palescandolo and published by iUniverse. This book was released on 2001 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Everyone will agree, a great Coney Island restaurant, one of a kind, is a coveted core sample of the late historical past. Imagine table talk and social customs of a pulsing patronage encased now in the cruel aspic of time. May I place you at a favored table facing a proscenium populated by diners—cooks, scullions, waiters, musicians of the cafe chantant scullery maids, deadbeats—and the notable and notorious of the years 1915-1975; an inscape for the "livingness" of an era. I, too, am playing my role, only consciously by writing what I remember in this loving memoir of a gathering place, a showplace of human kindred at its mellowed best. Not a history pinched by spinsterish qualms, bigoted asides, shrivelled libidos, and dyspeptic frowns, for bitter lips make for bitter palates, and stingy tipping. No, rather a free spending largesse cuore a cuore of matching vignettes, anecdotes, profiles, tintypes, tales and tattles in full bodied appearances. Restaurants are marvelous core samples of the past. How wonderful if all the great restaurants of the past were written up so devotedly and grandly!
Download or read book Art Animals and Experience written by Elizabeth Sutton and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-04-21 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Elizabeth Sutton, using a phenomenological approach, investigates how animals in art invite viewers to contemplate human relationships to the natural world. Using Rembrandt van Rijn’s etching of The Presentation in the Temple (c. 1640), Joseph Beuys’s social sculpture I Like America and America Likes Me (1974), archaic rock paintings at Horseshoe Canyon, Canyonlands National Park, and examples from contemporary art, this book demonstrates how artists across time and cultures employed animals to draw attention to the sensory experience of the composition and reflect upon the shared sensory awareness of the world.
