The animal part : human and other animals in the poetic imagination / Mark Payne.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Payne, Mark (Mark Edward)

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Animals in literature.

Philosophical anthropology in literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (175 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Chicago ; London : University of Chicago Press, 2010.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

How can literary imagination help us engage with the lives of other animals? The question represents one of the liveliest areas of inquiry in the humanities, and Mark Payne seeks to answer it by exploring the relationship between human beings and other animals in writings from antiquity to the present. Ranging from ancient Greek poets to modernists like Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams, Payne considers how writers have used verse to communicate the experience of animal suffering, created analogies between human and animal societies, and imagined the kind of knowledge that would be possible if human beings could see themselves as animals see them. The Animal Part also makes substantial contributions to the emerging discourse of the posthumanities. Payne offers detailed accounts of the tenuousness of the idea of the human in ancient literature and philosophy and then goes on to argue that close reading must remain a central practice of literary study if posthumanism is to articulate its own prehistory. For it is only through fine-grained literary interpretation that we can recover the poetic thinking about animals that has always existed alongside philosophical constructions of the human. In sum, The Animal Part marks a breakthrough in animal studies and offers a significant contribution to comparative poetics.

Contents:

Front matter

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. The Beast in Pain: Abjection and Aggression in Archilochus and William Carlos Williams

2. Destruction and Creation: The Work of Men and Animals in Gustave Flaubert, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Ezra Pound

3. Beyond the Pale: Joining the Society of Animals in Aristophanes, Herman Melville, and Louis- Ferdinand Céline

4. Changing Bodies: Being and Becoming an Animal in Semonides, Ovid, and H. P. Lovecraft

Epilogue. I Do Not Know What It Is I Am Like

References

Index of Humans

Index of Other Animals

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9786612894763

9781282894761

1282894765

9780226650852

0226650855

OCLC:

676698571