Overview
- Establishes animal biography as a critical approach to studying animals and human-animal relationships
- Contributes to the interdisciplinary research within the human-animal studies (HAS) field
- Draws from historical sources to illustrate the methods for creating animal biographies
Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature (PSAAL)
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Table of contents (13 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Keywords
About this book
While historiography is dominated by attempts that try to standardize and de-individualize the behavior of animals, history proves to be littered with records of the exceptional lives of unusual animals. This book introduces animal biography as an approach to the re-framing of animals as both objects of knowledge as well as subjects of individual lives. Taking an interdisciplinary perspective and bringing together scholars from, among others, literary, historical and cultural studies, the texts collected in this volume seek to refine animal biography as a research method and framework to studying, capturing, representing and acknowledging animal others as individuals. From Heini Hediger’s biting monitor, Hachikō and Murr to celluloid ape Caesar and the mourning of Topsy’s gruesome death, the authors discuss how animal biographies are discovered and explored through connections with humans that can be traced in archives, ethological fieldwork and novels, and probe the means ofconstructing animal biographies from taxidermy to film, literature and social media. Thus, they invite deeper conversations with socio-political and cultural contexts that allow animal biographies to provide narratives that reach beyond individual life stories, while experimenting with particular forms of animal biographies that might trigger animal activism and concerns for animal well-being, spur historical interest and enrich the literary imagination.
Reviews
“This extremely important volume provides rich and indispensable insight and great knowledge about the most important relationship in human life—those with animals, as species, collectives, and individuals. Biographical writing on animal personalities allows new ways of thinking about and with animals, as demonstrated in this fascinating compilation of impressive, scholarly and very well written articles.” (Gesine Krüger, Professor of Modern History, University of Zurich, Switzerland, and co-author of Tiere und Geschichte. Konturen einer “Animate History” (2014))
Editors and Affiliations
About the editors
André Krebber is Lecturer in Theory and History of Human-Animal Relations at the University of Kassel, Germany.
Mieke Roscher is Assistant Professor for Social and Cultural History and the History of Human-Animal Relations at the University of Kassel, Germany.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Animal Biography
Book Subtitle: Re-framing Animal Lives
Editors: André Krebber, Mieke Roscher
Series Title: Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98288-5
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2018
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-319-98287-8Published: 08 November 2018
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-07477-7Published: 26 January 2019
eBook ISBN: 978-3-319-98288-5Published: 19 October 2018
Series ISSN: 2634-6338
Series E-ISSN: 2634-6346
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XVI, 266
Number of Illustrations: 12 b/w illustrations
Topics: Literary Theory, Contemporary Literature, Animal Welfare/Animal Ethics