Product Description: Examining how ideas about species, sexuality, and gender link to 20th- and 21st-century literary texts, this wide-ranging collection of essays explores the complicated yet evocative relationship between animals and humans within a literary context...read more

Product Description: Examining a wide range of works, from Gulliver's Travels to The Hunger Games, Representing the Modern Animal in Culture employs key theoretical apparatuses of Animal Studies to literary texts. Contributors address the multifarious modes of animal representation and the range of human-animal interactions that have emerged in the past 300 years...read more

Product Description: The powerful exchanges between stage, stake, and scaffold - the theatre, the bear garden and the spectacle of public execution - crucially informed Shakespeare's explorations into the construction and workings of 'the human'. The theatre's family resemblance to animal baiting and the spectacle of punishment, its sharing of the same basic type of performance space - a theatre-in-the-round, a scaffold, stake or platform surrounded by spectators - bred an ever-ready potential for a transfer of images and meanings...read more

Product Description: Great literature resonates with us not only because of well-developed characters and plots, but also because it often reflects important social themes; these books explore a work of literature through the lens of the major issue reflected in it...read more

Product Description: Shakespeare wrote of lions, shrews, horned toads, curs, mastiffs, and hellhounds. But the word “animal” itself only appears very rarely in his work, which was in keeping with sixteenth-century usage. As Laurie Shannon reveals in The Accommodated Animal, the modern human / animal divide first came strongly into play in the seventeenth century, with Descartes’s famous formulation that reason sets humans above other species: “I think, therefore I am...read more

Product Description: Traces of the living animal run across the entire corpus of medieval writing and reveal how pervasively animals mattered in medieval thought and practice. In fascinating scenes of cross-species encounters, a raven offers St. Cuthbert a lump of lard that waterproofs his visitors' boots for a whole year, a scholar finds inspiration for his studies in his cat's perfect focus on killing mice, and a dispossessed knight wins back his heritage only to give it up again in order to save the life of his warhorse...read more

Product Description: This is the first book to discuss how the novel "The Call of the Wild" builds empathy with animals through character development. The current attention given to mirror neurons and their activation of empathy has created an interest in them as a neurobiological and cognitive tool for understanding others - "minds understanding minds...read more

Product Description: Polymorphous Domesticities maps out the play of gender, sexuality, and alternative forms of domesticity in the works of four modern European and American writers—Edith Wharton, Djuna Barnes, Colette, and J. R. Ackerley. What these four writers have in common is a defiance of patriarchal paradigms in their lives as well as in their works...read more

Product Description:  How to Make a Human: Animals and Violence in the Middle Ages tracks human attempts to cordon humans off from other life through a wide range of medieval texts and practices, including encyclopedias, dietary guides, resurrection doctrine, cannibal narrative, butchery law, boar-hunting, and teratology...read more

Product Description: Simone Weil once wrote that "the vulnerability of precious things is beautiful because vulnerability is a mark of existence," establishing a relationship between vulnerability, beauty, and existence transcending the separation of species...read more