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Posthumus, Liane. "Hybrid monsters in the Classical World : the nature and function of hybrid monsters in Greek mythology, literature and art." Thesis, Stellenbosch : University of Stellenbosch, 2011. http://hdl.handle.net/10019.1/6865.
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Thesis (MPhil (Ancient Studies))--University of Stellenbosch, 2011.ENGLISH ABSTRACT: The aim of this thesis is to explore the purpose of monster figures by investigating the relationship between these creatures and the cultures in which they are generated. It focuses specifically on the human-animal hybrid monsters in the mythology, literature and art of ancient Greece. It attempts to answer the question of the purpose of these monsters by looking specifically at the nature of manhorse monsters and the ways in which their dichotomous internal and external composition challenged the cultural taxonomy of ancient Greece. It also looks at the function of monsters in a ritual context and how the Theseus myth, as initiation myth, and the Minotaur, as hybrid monster, conforms to the expectations of ritual monsters. The investigation starts by considering the history and uses of the term “monster” in an attempt to arrive at a reasonable definition of monstrosity. In aid of this definition, attention is also given to themes that recur when considering monster beings. This provides a basis from which the hybrid monsters of ancient Greece, the centaur and Minotaur in particular, can be considered. The next section of the thesis looks into the attitudes to animals prevalent in ancient Greece. The cultural value of certain animal types and even certain body parts have to be taken account, and the degree to which these can be traced to the nature and actions of the hybrid monster has to be considered. The main argument is divided in two sections. The first deals with the centaur as challenger to Greek cultural taxonomy. The centaur serves as an eminent example of how human-animal hybrid monsters combine the familiar and the foreign, the Self and the Other into a single complex being. The nature of this monster is examined with special reference to the ways in which the centaur, as proponent of chaos and wilderness, stands in juxtaposition to the ideals of Greek civilisation. The second section consists of an enquiry into the purpose of the hybrid monster and considers the Minotaur’s role as a facilitator of transformation. The focus is directed towards the ritual function of monsters and the ways in which monsters aid change and renewal both in individuals and in communities. By considering the Theseus-myth and the role of the Minotaur in the coming-of-age of the Attic hero as well as the city of Athens itself, the ritual theory is given application in ancient Greece. The conclusion of this thesis is that hybrid monsters, as manifestations of the internal dichotomy of man and the tenuous relationship between order and chaos, played a critical role in the personal and communal definition of man in ancient Greece.
AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Die doelstelling van hierdie tesis is om die sin van monsters te ondersoek deur te kyk na die verhouding wat bestaan tussen hierdie wesens en die gemeenskappe waarbinne hulle hul ontstaan het. Die tesis fokus spesifiek op die mens-dier hibriede monster in die mitologie, literatuur en kuns van antieke Griekeland. Dit probeer om tot ‘n slotsom te kom oor die bestaansrede van monsters deur te kyk na die aard van die man-perd monster. Hierdie wese se tweeledige samestelling – met betrekking tot beide sy interne en eksterne komposisie – het ‘n wesenlike bedreiging ingehou vir die kulturele taksonomie van die antieke Grieke. Die tesis kyk ook na die rol, van monsters in die konteks van rituele gebeure. Die mite van Theseus as ‘n mite met rituele verbintenisse, en die Minotaurus as hibriede monster, word dan oorweeg om te bepaal wat die ooreenstemming is met die verwagtinge wat daargestel is vir rituele monsters. Ten einde ‘n redelike definisie van monsteragtigheid daar te stel, begin die ondersoek deur oorweging te skenk aan die geskiedenis en die gebruike van die woord “monster”. Ter ondersteuning van hierdie definisie word daar ook aandag geskenk aan sekere temas wat herhaaldelik opduik wanneer monsters ter sprake kom. Dit skep ‘n basis vir die ondersoek na die hibriede monsters van antieke Griekeland, en meer spesifiek na die kentaurus en die Minotaurus. Die tesis oorweeg ook die houding van die antieke Griekse beskawing teenoor diere. Die kulturele waarde van sekere soorte diere, en selfs seker ledemate van diere, moet in ag geneem word wanneer die hibriede monsterfiguur behandel word. Aandag moet geskenk word aan die maniere waarop die assosiasies wat die Grieke met diere gehad het, oorgedra word na die aard en handelinge van die monsterfiguur. Die hoofargument van die tesis word in twee dele uiteengesit. Die eerste gedeelte behandel die kentaurus as uitdager van die kulturele taksonomie van die antieke Grieke. Die kentaurus dien as ‘n uitstekende voorbeeld van die manier waarop die mens-dier monster dit wat bekend is en dit wat vreemd is, die Self en die Ander, kombineer in een komplekse wese. Die aard van hierdie wese word ondersoek met spesifieke verwysing na die maniere waarop die kentaurus, as voorstander van die ongetemde en van chaos, in teenstelling staan teenoor die ideale van die Griekse beskawing. Die tweede gedeelte vors die doel van die hibriede monster na en oorweeg die Minotaurus se rol as bevorderaar van transformasie. Hier word gefokus op die rol van die monster in ’n rituele konteks en die maniere waarop monsters verandering en vernuwing teweegbring in enkelinge sowel as in gemeenskappe. Hierdie teorie word van toepassing gemaak op antieke Griekeland deur die mite van Theseus en die rol van die Minotaurus te oorweeg binne die konteks van die proses van inburgering wat beide die held en sy stad, Athene, ondergaan. Die gevolgtrekking van hierdie tesis is dat hibriede monsters, as uitbeeldings van die interne tweeledigheid van die mens sowel as van die tenger verband tussen orde en chaos in die wêreld, ‘n noodsaaklike rol gespeel het in die persoonlike en sosiale definisie van die individu in antieke Griekeland.
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Grundy, Thomas. "On Teaching the Bible as Literature: A Mythical Bias." 名古屋大学文学部, 1999. http://hdl.handle.net/2237/5508.
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Butcher, Kenton Bryan. "Ralph Ellison's Mythical Method in Invisible Man." Kent State University / OhioLINK, 2016. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=kent1461407953.
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Edwards, Peggy Ann. "Portmanteau." Morgantown, W. Va. : [West Virginia University Libraries], 2003. http://etd.wvu.edu/templates/showETD.cfm?recnum=3227.
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Thesis (M.F.A.)--West Virginia University, 2003.Title from document title page. Document formatted into pages; contains iv, 12 p. : ill. (some col.) Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references (p. 4).
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Rajsic, Jaclyn. "Britain and Albion in the mythical histories of medieval England." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2013. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:bc55a2b2-6156-4401-958b-0a6f454f9c6d.
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This dissertation examines the ideological role and adaptation of the mythical British past (derived from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae) in chronicles of England written in Anglo-Norman, Latin, and English from the twelfth to the fifteenth century, in terms of the shaping of English history during this time. I argue that the past is an important lens through which we can read the imagined geographies (Albion, Britain and England) and ‘imagined communities’ (the British and English), to use Benedict Anderson’s term, constructed by historical texts. I consider how British history was carefully re-shaped and combined with chronologically conflicting accounts of early English history (derived from Bede) to create a continuous view of the English past, one in which the British kings are made English or ‘of England’. Specifically, I examine the connections between geography and genealogy, which I argue become inextricably linked in relation to mythical British history from the thirteenth century onwards. From that point on, British kings are increasingly shown to be the founders and builders of England, rather than Britain, and are integrated into genealogies of England’s contemporary kings. I argue that short chronicles written in Latin and Anglo-Norman during the thirteenth century evidence a confidence that the ancient Britons were perceived as English, and equally a strong sense of Englishness. These texts, I contend, anticipate the combination of British and English histories that scholars find in the lengthier and better-known Brut histories written in the early fourteenth century. For the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, my study takes account of the Albina myth, the story of the mothers of Albion’s giants (their arrival in Albion before Brutus’s legendary conquest of the land). There has been a surge of scholarship about the Albina myth in recent years. My analysis of hitherto unknown accounts of the tale, which appear in some fifteenth-century genealogical rolls, leads me to challenge current interpretations of the story as a myth of foundation and as apparently problematic for British and English history. My discussion culminates with an analysis of some copies of the prose Brut chronicle (c. 1300) – the most popular secular, vernacular text in later medieval England, but it is seldom studied – and of some fifteenth-century genealogies of England’s kings. In both cases, I am concerned with presentations of the passage of dominion from British to English rulership in the texts and manuscripts in question. My preliminary investigation of the genealogies aims to draw attention to this very under-explored genre. In all, my study shows that the mythical British past was a site of adaptation and change in historical and genealogical texts written in England throughout the high and later Middle Ages. It also reveals short chronicles, prose Brut texts and manuscripts, and royal genealogies to have great potential future research.
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Stalla, Heidi. "Life is in the manuscript : Virginia Woolf, historiography, and the 'mythical method'." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2015. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:58e6f835-b776-4a87-bafd-f48525c11918.
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Virginia Woolf's writing is aesthetically complex, politically engaged, and remains relevant today - an astonishing achievement. This thesis begins by asking how and why this is the case, and thinks through Woolf's relationship to history as a means of suggesting some answers. References to the past abound in Woolf's fiction in the form of meaningful names, stories, myths, and national histories. I am especially interested in allusions that are not immediately obvious, but still work to convey something about human nature. These were sometimes inspired by artifacts in museums, or by articles in magazines or newspapers, or literature she owned, or borrowed, or was being written by her contemporaries - sources that a careful researcher can track down. Other references are more difficult to prove; for example, they may have come from travel experiences related by friends, or personal experiences not recorded in her diary. In this case we need to balance circumstantial evidence, common sense, and an understanding of the spirit and concerns of the age. In the first chapter I highlight Woolf's early interest in the tension between fact and fiction as it is expressed in her 1906 short story, "The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn". The chapter serves as way of demonstrating my process. I point out the interplay between form, content, and autobiography that is in her other work. In short, a good deal of what is imagined may have been inspired by personal experience and real historical material. The next three chapters reveal new character types and source material for Jacob's Room, To the Lighthouse, and The Waves - the novels in which Woolf worked out what I have called her "mythical method". I end by inviting scholars to reconsider tensions in her work such as fact and fiction, self and other, art and politics from a new angle: not only as thematic preoccupations but also as crucial to thinking of - to borrow from Gertrude Stein - composition as a form of explanation. Woolf's project in fiction was to figure out what modernism can and should do. Although it is not necessary for all readers to do the kind of research demonstrated here in order to understand the novels, having an awareness of this work is important. This new way of looking at how and why Woolf wrote both in and outside of time as part of the process of composition makes us think again about the reasons that we should care so much about "Mrs. Brown". It helps us appreciate that the project of conveying both the ephemeral and temporal qualities of human experience is what makes the study of literary modernism (and its current global, transnational forms) a dynamic, political, and expanding phenomenon today.
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陳桂月 and Kwee-nyet Chin. "The mythical world of modern Chinese writers (1919-1949)." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 1995. http://hub.hku.hk/bib/B31234744.
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Bosman, Brenda Evadne. "Alternative mythical structures in the fiction of Patrick White." Thesis, Rhodes University, 1990. http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1001821.
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The texts in this study interrogate the dominant myths which have affected the constructs of identity and history in the white Australian socio-historical context. These myths are exposed by White as ideologically determined and as operating by processes of exclusion, repression and marginalisation. White challenges the autonomy of both European and Australian cultures, reveals the ideological complicity between them and adopts a critical approach to all Western cultural assumptions. As a post-colonial writer, White shares the need of both post-colonising and post-colonised groups for an identity established not in terms of the colonial power but in terms of themselves. As a dissident white male, he is a privileged member of the post- colonising group but one who rejects the dominant discourses as illegitimate and unlegitimating. He offers a re-writing of the myths underpinning colonial and post-colonising discourses which privileges their suppressed and repressed elements. His re-writings affect aboriginal men and women, white women and the 'privileged' white male whose subjection to social control is masked as unproblematic freedom. White's re-writing of myth enbraces the post-modern as well as the post- colonial. He not only deconstructs and demystifies the phallogocentric/ethnocentric order of things; he also attempts to avoid totalization by privileging indeterminacy, fragmentation, hybridization and those liminary states which defy articulation: the ecstatic, the abject, the unspeakable. He himself is denied authority in that his re-writings are presented as mere acts in the always provisional process of making interpretations. White acknowledges the problematics of both presentation and re-presentation - an unresolved tension between the post-colonial desire for self-definition and the post-modern decentring of all meaning and interpretation permeates his discourse. The close readings of the texts attempt, accordingly, to reflect varying oppositional strategies: those which seek to overturn hierarchies and expose power-relations and those which seek an idiom in which contemporary Australia may find its least distorted reflexion. Within this ideological context, the Lacanian thematics of the subject, and their re-writing by Kristeva, are linked with dialectical criticism in an attempt to reflect a strictly provisional process of (re) construction
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Vaccaro, Jacob. "Mythical, historical and allegorical narratives in Till we have faces." Diss., Connect to the thesis, 1998. http://hdl.handle.net/10066/1477.
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Kemp, Nathan C. "Animals of the New World." University of Akron / OhioLINK, 2015. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=akron1427713735.
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Moses, David. "Writing animals, speaking animals : the displacement and placement of the animal in medieval literature." Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2004. http://hdl.handle.net/1842/8364.
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This thesis examines the way the absence of moral consideration of the animal in Christian doctrine is evident in Middle English literature. A fundamental difference between the theology and literature of the medieval period is literature's capacity to present and theorise positions that cannot, for various reasons, be theorised in the official discourses provided by commentators and theologians. Patterns of excluding the animal from moral consideration by Christianity are instigated with the rejection of the ethics of late Neoplatonism. Highlighted by Neoplatonists, and evident in the stylistic differences in reading scripture and philosophy, is an early Christian ideological predisposition toward purely humanocentric concerns. The disparity between a definite Hellenic ethic of the animal and its absence in Christian thought is most evident in the contrast between an outward looking Neoplatonic understanding of creation, and the closed matrix of scholastic interpretative thought. Influential textual representations of the universe require that creation is interpreted through a fideistically enclosed system of signs. The individual must have faith before approaching knowledge. The animal is placed into a system dominated by the primacy of faith in God, which paradoxically produces the predetermined answers supplied by Christian doctrine and selective scriptural and doctrinal suppositions. In literary texts, the animal provides an obvious method of Christian debate. Contemporary theological values, such as the doctrinal commonplace of comparing man with animal in the corporeal context highlights the uncomfortable similarity to, yet prescribes that man aspire to distance himself from, the animal. The primacy of man and the importance of his salvation, is a doctrine which countermands the theocentric basis of Christian theology, in which God is understood as a presence in all his creation. Such conflicting perspectives result in animals in medieval literature being used to test theological and philosophical parameters, illustrating the inadequacy of sharp theological boundaries, and demonstrating the ability of literary expression to escape that which has already been enclosed.
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Howard, Darren Phillip. "Imperial animals romanticism and the politicized animal /." Diss., Restricted to subscribing institutions, 2007. http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=1495946181&sid=1&Fmt=2&clientId=1564&RQT=309&VName=PQD.
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Burgess, Moira. ""Between the words of a song" supernatural and mythical elements in the Scottish fiction of Naomi Mitchison /." Thesis, Connect to e-thesis, 2006. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/1046/.
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Thesis (Ph.D.) -- University of Glasgow, 2006.Includes bibliographical references (p. 270-288). Print version also available. Mode of access : World Wide Web. System requirements : Adobe Acrobat reader required to view PDF document.
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Shochat, Bagon Robin. "The vertigo of the beast : thinking animals in literature." Thesis, University of Sussex, 2016. http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/id/eprint/59662/.
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This thesis begins with the claim that the most productive and stimulating manner of addressing the question of the animal is through an engagement with the writings of Jacques Derrida. In particular, it picks up on his comment in The Animal that Therefore I Am that “thinking concerning the animal, if there is such a thing, derives from poetry.” As such, the thesis explores the specific ways in which the resources of literature can be used in order to address what is possibly the most pressing ethical task of modern humanity. One of the central questions of the thesis concerns how what Derrida calls carnophallogocentrism can be confronted by literature. Through readings of Herman Melville's Moby-Dick and the poetry and short stories of D.H. Lawrence, I explore how literature is uniquely placed to offer a sense of the radical otherness of nonhuman animals. In perhaps a contradictory manner, I also examine how literary resources can be used to evoke a sense of pity for nonhumans. There are two further important, and connected, areas of enquiry. The first relates to the position of man who is constructed in opposition to nonhuman animals and is given the right to put nonhumans to death. As such, I study how a variety of texts, chiefly J.M. Coetzee's Foe and Philip Roth's American Pastoral, reveal the fragility of some of the chief notions of humanism and give way to what has been theorised as posthumanism. The second engages with what Derrida calls “eating well.” This is a question which receives its most thorough investigation through a reading of Margaret Atwood's dystopian Maddaddam trilogy.
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Henson, Chelsea, and Chelsea Henson. "Between Animals and Angels: Rethinking Extracategorical Bodies in Medieval Literature." Thesis, University of Oregon, 2012. http://hdl.handle.net/1794/12439.
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Medieval bodies often push against easy categorization. Hybrids, saints, giants, and transformative bodies are represented in literature as falling between or occupying multiple taxonomic hierarchical positions of divine, human, or animal.10000-01-01
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Alcorn, Haili A. "Beauty and the Beasts: Making Places with Literary Animals of Florida." Scholar Commons, 2018. https://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd/7462.
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Place theory examines the relationship between human identity and physical locations, asking how meaningful attachments are formed between people and the spots they visit or in which they live. Literature of place exhibits this relationship and the myriad ways humans connect to their environment through storytelling, both fictional and nonfictional. Florida literature, an emerging and dynamic genre, features characters, cultures, and histories heavily embedded in place. Florida’s places also abound with animal presences, and literature about Florida almost always illustrates significant human-animal interactions that drive plots and character development. Therefore, Florida literature invites consideration of how animals influence human attachment to the land in stories written by Florida authors. Scholarly attention has noted the important relationships formed by humans and animals in literature about Florida, but no extensive study incorporating place theory, ecocriticism, and close reading has been done on the literary representation of Florida animals or their contribution to the state’s diverse reputations.
This dissertation brings together theories about place attachment, ecocriticism, and critical animal studies (CAS) to illustrate the roles of fictional and nonfictional animals in works by six Florida authors: William Bartram, Marjory Stoneman Douglas, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Elizabeth Bishop, Rachel Carson, and John Henry Fleming. These works contain prominent animal characters that illuminate four ways of seeing Florida: idyllic Florida, wild Florida, opportunistic Florida, and mysterious Florida. These identities build off historical views about Florida as place: explorers, tourists, and developers projected their hopes for advancement onto the state based on its reputation as an exotic paradise, wild hinterland, or untouched beacon for industry and agriculture. Literature helped to produce these ideas about Florida through travel writing, but Florida stories also critique opportunistic ideologies responsible for harming animals and the environment. Literature can also preserve Florida’s mysteries and myths, offering narratives about nature and animals that challenge notions of human superiority. Thus, literature enacts a dynamic engagement with the four faces of Florida I discuss.
Florida animals are vital to the construction of these four identities. For example, Henry Bunk, the protagonist of Douglas’s Alligator Crossings, sees the Everglades as an idyllic alternative to the city for its many birds and fish. Rawlings depicts Cross Creek as a wild host to deadly snakes, predatory big cats, and ubiquitous insects. Bishop captures through poetry the ordinary activity of Florida fishing in such a way that invites us to question the harm inflicted on animals for the opportunity of recreation. Fleming’s stories suggest that exploration, industry, and science have mostly erased the mysteries of Florida’s natural world, but his enigmatic and monstrous animals, along with their ties to the land, offer hope for reviving a meaningful attachment to the land.
This dissertation connects literary representations of animals to real forms of violence occurring in Florida today, including fishing, caged hunting, and animal captivity. The works examined herein can prompt readers to rethink their own relationships to place and to nonhuman nature. As a cultural force, literature holds the potential for effecting change in our world. Beginning with the local is one way of witnessing this potential for the dynamic interplay between literature and place.
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Mason, Jennifer Adrienne. "Civilized creatures animality, cultural power, and American literature, 1850-1901 /." Digital version:, 2000. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/utexas/fullcit?p9992865.
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Castell, James Alexander. "Wordsworth and animal life." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2012. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.610804.
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Bourns, Timothy. "Between nature and culture : animals and humans in Old Norse literature." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2017. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:6f561cfd-74d7-4369-b4e8-a78f030ccb16.
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This thesis demonstrates how animals and humans are interconnected in Old Norse literature. The two categories are both constructed and challenged in a variety of ways, depending on the textual genre and animal species. It thus reveals medieval Norse-Icelandic ideas, values, and beliefs about animals. The thesis is theoretical, comparative, and interdisciplinary, yet firmly rooted in a close reading of the sagas and analysis of their cultural-historical context. The first chapter explores relationships between people and domestic animals, namely horses and dogs, and to a lesser extent, cats and livestock. The second chapter evaluates the limitations to the human-animal relationship: prohibitions against bestiality and the consumption of certain animals as meat. The third chapter studies animals in dreams, which reflect human characters and share their fate and defining characteristics. The fourth chapter investigates human-animal transformations, whether physical, psychological, or both. The fifth chapter analyses human-animal communication, with a particular focus on human comprehension of the language of birds. The sixth chapter considers relations between animals and gods in Norse mythology; these parallel the connections between humans and animals in the sagas. The thesis determines how the human/animal dichotomy might have been thought about differently before and after the conversion to Christianity, with boundaries between animal and human becoming more clearly delineated; it examines how medieval Icelandic authors wrote about animals in experiential terms, but also drew upon conventional symbolism from continental Europe; and it proves how these literary representations of animals reflect an environmental ideology that was actively engaged with the imaginative, the supernatural, and the animal.
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Stewart, Kirsty. "Nature and narratives : landscapes, plants and animals in Palaiologan vernacular literature." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2015. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:2c1ad3f2-6ca1-4a5b-b682-fbb0bfc58fd2.
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This thesis identifies the role of nature within Palaiologan entertainment literature. The texts on which this thesis focuses include a selection of the Palaiologan novels, namely the Achilleid, Velthandros and Chrysandza, Kallimachos and Chrysorroi and Livistros and Rodamni, as well as two other, more satirical works, The Synaxarion of the Honourable Donkey, and An Entertaining Tale of Quadrupeds. These texts seem to be different from earlier works in which nature is prominent, utilising such material in an innovative way. The study of these texts provides us with information both on the Byzantine view of the natural world and on the use of literature during a particularly troubled period of Byzantine history. My main questions therefore are how nature is portrayed in these texts and what can this tell us about the society that produced them. The study of these vernacular texts indicates that the natural world is given a prominent place in the literature of the period, using landscapes, plants and animals in diverse ways to express assorted ideas, or to stress particular aspects of the stories. The animals and landscapes provide hints of the plot to the audience, which the authors sometimes then subvert. The authors draw on earlier Greek material, but parallels with literature from other cultures show similarities which imply a shared medieval perspective on nature with local differences.
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Mattera, Carole Anne, and Patricia Anne Atherton. "A thematic guide involving students in literature-based activities utilizing animals." CSUSB ScholarWorks, 1994. https://scholarworks.lib.csusb.edu/etd-project/943.
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Powici, Christopher. "The wolf and literature." Thesis, University of Stirling, 2002. http://hdl.handle.net/1893/24386.
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This thesis explores how wolves, and other animals, are represented in a variety of literary texts. At stake in these explorations is the shifting and problematic border between the human and the animal, culture and nature, civilisation and the wild. Because of its biological proximity to the domestic dog, as well as the ways in which it has been figured as both the ultimate expression of wild savagery and of maternal love, the wolf is an exemplary guide to this border. The wolf traces the ways in which the human/animal border has been constructed, sustained and transgressed. These border crossings take on a special resonance given the widespread sense of a contemporary environmental crisis. In this respect this thesis amounts to a contribution to the field of ecocriticism and pays special attention to the claim that the environmental crisis is also a 'crisis of the imagination', of our ideational and aesthetic relationship to the nonhuman world. With this in mind I look closely at some of the main currents of ecocriticism with a view to showing how certain psychoanalytic and poststructuralust approaches can enhance an overall ecocritical stance. It is an analysis which will also show how the sense of environmental emergency cannot be divorced from other critical and political concerns, including those concerns highlighted by feminist and postcolonial critics. In the words of a much favoured environmentalist slogan, 'everything connects to everything else'. Ultimately this thesis shows that how we imagine the wolf, and nature in general, in literary texts, is inextricably bound up with our relationship to, and treatment of, the natural world and the animals, including human beings, for whom that world is home.
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Budy, Brooke Sparrow. "No animals were harmed: a translation of Jean-Michel Ribes's Theatre sans animaux." Thesis, University of Iowa, 2008. https://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/198.
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McFarland, Sarah Elizabeth. "Engendering the wild : the construction of animals in twentieth century nature writing /." view abstract or download file of text, 2005. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/uoregon/fullcit?p3181112.
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Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2005.Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 169-179). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.
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Essert, Emily Margaret. "A modernist menagerie: representations of animals in the work of five North American Poets." Thesis, McGill University, 2013. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=114133.
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This dissertation considers the representation of animals in Canadian and American modernist poetry. In investigating the relationship between the proliferation of animal tropes and imagery and experimental poetics, it argues that modernism is fundamentally concerned with reconsidering human nature and humanity's place in the modern world. By employing a blend of socio-historical and formalist approaches, while also incorporating theoretical approaches from animal studies, this project shows that the modernist moment is importantly post-Darwinian, and that the species boundary was an important site of ideological struggle. This project also makes an intervention into the New Modernist Studies by proposing "North American Modernism" as a coherent area of inquiry; too few studies consider American and Canadian writers together, but doing so enables a richer understanding of modernism as a complex, global movement. Chapter one argues that animal tropes and imagery form part of a strategy through which Marianne Moore and H.D. challenge prevailing conceptions of femininity. Building upon theoretical work that considers sexism and speciesism as interlocking oppressions, it offers a sharper picture of their conceptions of gender and their feminist intentions. Chapter two considers impersonality and animality in the work of T.S. Eliot and P.K. Page. Like the concept of impersonality, Eliot's influence on Page is often taken for granted in the critical literature; it argues that impersonality (in Eliot's formulation) relies upon embodied personal experience, and on that basis offers an account of Eliot's anxieties about embodiment and Page's lapsus. Finally, chapter three investigates Marianne Moore's and Irving Layton's representation of animals to communicate indirectly their responses to global crises. Both poets felt a strong compulsion to comment on social and moral issues, but found it difficult to do so directly; images and tropes of animals enabled Moore to produce modernist allegories, and assisted Layton in depicting human ferity.Cette thèse examine la représentation des animaux dans la poésie moderniste du Canada et des États-Unis. En étudiant la relation entre la prolifération des tropes et d'imagerie animale et la poésie expérimentale, je soutiens que le modernisme est fondamentalement préoccupé par la reconsidération de la nature de l'être humain et sa place dans le monde moderne. En utilisant un mariage d'approches socio-historiques et formaliste, tout en incorporant des avances théoriques provenant d'études animales, je démontre que le moment moderniste est post-darwinien de façon significative, et que la frontière des espèces était un champ de bataille important de la lutte idéologique. Mon projet fait également une intervention parmi les nouvelles études du modernisme en proposant le «modernisme nord-américain» comme un espace cohérent; trop peu d'études considèrent les écrivains américains et canadiens dans un ensemble, mais cela permet une compréhension plus riche du modernisme comme étant un mouvement complexe et mondial. Je soutiens que les tropes et l'imagerie animale font partie d'une stratégie à travers laquelle Marianne Moore et H.D. contestent les conceptions dominantes de la féminité. En m'appuyant sur les travaux théoriques qui considèrent le sexisme et l'espècisme comme oppressions entremêlées, j'offre une image plus nette de leurs conceptions du genre et de leurs intentions féministes. Ensuite, je considère l'impersonnalité et l'animalité dans les travaux de T.S. Eliot et P.K. Page. Comme le concept de l'impersonnalité, l'influence d'Eliot sur Page est souvent prise pour acquis dans la critique littéraire; je soutiens donc que l'impersonnalité (dans la formulation d'Eliot) s'appuie sur l'expérience personnelle incarnée, et sur cette base, je mets en évidence les inquiétudes d'Eliot et les lapsus de Page. Enfin, j'examine la représentation des animaux chez Marianne Moore et Irving Layton qui communiquent indirectement leurs répliques aux crises mondiales. Les deux poètes ont ressenti une forte compulsion pour commenter les questions sociales et morales, mais ont trouvé difficile de le faire directement; les tropes et les imageries de l'espèce animale ont permis à Moore de produire des allégories modernistes, et ont soutenues Layton pour dépeindre l'animalerie humaine.
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Koenig, Madison. "Mythical Places, Magical Communities: The Transformative Powers of Collective Storytelling in Toni Morrison's Paradise and Karen Russell's Swamplandia!" Ohio University Honors Tutorial College / OhioLINK, 2015. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ouhonors1429892496.
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Marlatt, Cameo Rae-Ann. "Letters for a Newfoundland Dog and other encounters with nonhuman animals ; Bird's Work." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2018. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/30584/.
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This project encompasses a collection of lyric essays and a collection of poetry engaging with the topic of zoopoetics, which as a field is interested in the way that attentiveness to the poiesis of nonhuman animals can shape human creative forms. The lyric essays, which form my critical component, are each centered on what Donna Haraway would refer to as a ‘companion species,’ a term that extends beyond companion animals such as pets to include any animals we share our lives with. Looking at frogs, dogs, whales, cats, bats, and parrots, I explore my personal history with specific animals of these species, and also analyze their representation in literature, art, and popular culture. Within a zoopoetic framework, the essays engage with scholarship around anthropomorphism, animals and gender, animal captivity, and animal history. The poetry collection, which forms my creative component, explores various ways of writing nonhuman animals. Writing with curiosity and attentiveness towards non-human animals, I aim for my poems to embody the shared animal-human poiesis at the heart of zoopoetics.
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Marchant, Jennifer Esther Robertson Susina Jan. "Beauty and the beast the relationships between female protagonists and animals in children's and adolescent novels written by women /." Normal, Ill. Illinois State University, 2003. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/ilstu/fullcit?p3106758.
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Thesis (Ph. D.)--Illinois State University, 2003.Title from title page screen, viewed October 17, 2005. Dissertation Committee: Jan C. Susina (chair), C. Anita Tarr, Cynthia A. Huff. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 171-184) and abstract. Also available in print.
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Seda, Ilter. "The Use Of Time As An Element Of Alienation Effect In Peter Shaffer." Master's thesis, METU, 2006. http://etd.lib.metu.edu.tr/upload/12607304/index.pdf.
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This thesis studies Peter Shaffer&rsquos use of time as a technique for creating alienation effect. In order to provide the audience with a questioning role, Shaffer primarily employs historical and mythical past as elements of pastness in the Brechtian sense. Shaffer also innovatively contributes to the formation of alienation effect with spatial time achieved through the coexistence of past and present. Distancing the audience in time, the playwright leads them to adopt a critical viewpoint so that they can question and reflect upon the psychological and metaphysical themes such as search for worship, existential disintegration and the eternal conflict between reason and instinct in his plays The Royal Hunt of the Sun, Yonadab, and The Gift of the Gorgon.
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Parry, Catherine Helen. "Reading animals and the human-animal divide in twenty-first century fiction." Thesis, University of Lincoln, 2016. http://eprints.lincoln.ac.uk/23370/.
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The Western conception of the proper human proposes that there is a potent divide between humans and all other animate creatures. Even though the terms of such a divide have been shown to be indecisive, relationships between humans and animals continue to take place across it, and are conditioned by the ways it is imagined. My thesis asks how twenty-first century fiction engages with and practises the textual politics of animal representation, and the forms these representations take when their positions relative to the many and complex compositions of the human-animal divide are taken into account. My analysis is located in contemporary critical debate about human-animal relationships. Taking the animal work of such thinkers as Jacques Derrida and Cary Wolfe as a conceptual starting point, I make a detailed and precise engagement with the conditions and terms of literary animal representation in order to give forceful shape to awkward and uncomfortable ideas about animals. Derrida contends that there is a “plural and repeatedly folded frontier” between human and nonhuman animals, and my study scrutinises the multiple conditions at play in the conceptual and material composition of this frontier as it is invoked in fictional animal representations. I argue that human relationships with animals are conditioned by our imaginative shapings of them, and that the animals we imagine are, therefore, of enormous significance for real animals. Working in the newly established field of Literary Animal Studies, I read representations of ordinary animals in a selection of twenty-first century novels, including Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People, E. O. Wilson’s Anthill, Carol Hart’s A History of the Novel in Ants, Aryn Kyle’s The God of Animals, Yann Martel’s Beatrice and Virgil, Mark McNay’s Fresh, James Lever’s Me Cheeta, and Karen Joy Fowler’s We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves. I interrogate how fictional animal forms and tropes are responding to, participating in or challenging the ways animals’ lives are lived out in consequence of human imaginings of them. There are many folds in the frontier between human and nonhuman animals, and my thesis is structured to address how particular forms of discursive boundary-building are invoked in, shape, or are shaped by, the fictional representations of animals. Each of the four chapters in this study takes spectively, political, metaphorical, material and cognitive – between humans and other animals. Analysis is directed at developing concepts and critical practices which articulate the singular literariness of the human, ant, horse, donkey, chicken and ape representations encountered throughout my study. Understanding the ways we make animals through our imaginative eyes is essential to understanding how we make our ethical relationships with them. A key task for Literary Animal Studies is to make visible how literary animal representations may either reinforce homogeneous and reductive conceptions of animals, or may participate in a re-making of our imaginings of them. My study contributes to clarifications of the terms of this task by evolving ways to read unusual or unacknowledged manifestations of the human-animal divide, by giving form to previously unarticulated questions and conditions about how animals are imagined, and by evaluating literary re-imaginings of them.
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Walsh, Susan Ann Bintu. "Untheming the theme : the child in wolf's clothing." Thesis, University of Reading, 2001. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.367713.
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Trejling, Maria. "The Vulnerable Animals That Therefore We Are : (Non-)Human Animals in D.H. Lawrence's Women in Love." Thesis, Stockholms universitet, Engelska institutionen, 2016. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:su:diva-131606.
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Central to animal studies is the question of words and how they are used in relation to wordless beings such as non-human animals. This issue is addressed by the writer D.H. Lawrence, and the focus of this thesis is the linguistic vulnerability of humans and non-humans in his novel Women in Love, a subject that will be explored with the help of the philosopher Jacques Derrida’s text The Animal That Therefore I Am. The argument is that Women in Love illustrates the human subjection to and constitution in language, which both enables human thinking and restricts the human ability to think without words. This linguistic vulnerability causes a similar vulnerability in non-human animals in two ways. First, humans tend to imagine others, including non-verbal animals, through words, a medium they exist outside of and therefore cannot be defined through. Second, humans are often unperceptive of non-linguistic means of expression and they therefore do not discern what non-human animals may be trying to communicate to them, which often enables humans to justify abuse against non-humans. In addition, the novel shows how this shared but unequal vulnerability can sometimes be dissolved through the likewise shared but equal physical vulnerability of all animals if a human is able to imagine the experiences of a non-human animal through their shared embodiment rather than through human language. Hence the essay shows the importance of recognizing the limitations of language and of being aware of how the symbolizing effect of words influences the human treatment of its others.
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Margalit, Yael. "Creaturely pleasures : the representation of animals in early modern drama." Thesis, McGill University, 2008. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=115607.
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This dissertation addresses the profound influence that the shared experience of humans and animals had on the poetics of early modern drama. With reference to a selection of early modern comedies and a range of non-literary texts that includes natural history encyclopedias and animal husbandry manuals, I argue that the vernacular knowledge of animals shaped the early modern imagination generally and the early modern playwright's imagination particularly. I propose an original approach to early modern literature, one which urges integrating a consideration of the real-world referent for animal representation, the collective life lived by humans and animals, and the poetics of early modern drama.In my introduction, I take up the dissertation's general claims about the ethical and historiographical dimension of interpreting early modern animal representation. I continue to work at this theoretical level in Chapter One, where I consider how the animal-focused disciplines of sociobiology and ecology can help and hinder readers interpret early modern drama. In the following chapters, I work closely with a selection of early modern plays, contexts, and literary and theatrical devices. Chapter Two focuses on a web of comic plays that feature instantiations of animals in stage properties and actor's gestures. The web of plays in Chapter Two includes the anonymous Mucedorus; Lording Barry's Ram Alley; John Fletcher's Women Pleased; Thomas Nashe's Summer's Last Will and Testament ; William Rowley, Thomas Dekker, and John Ford's The Witch of Edmonton; Shakespeare's Love's Labor Lost; and Shakespeare and Fletcher's Two Noble Kinsmen. Chapter Three is devoted to the anthropomorphism of the allegorical representations of animals in Ben Jonson's plays Volpone and The Alchemist. In my reading of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream in Chapter Four, I move on to consider animals whose representation is removed from reality not merely by anthropomorphism, but also by magic. All of these instances of representation draw animals into a sphere of existence that is commonly understood as the exclusive domain of humans at the same time that they draw humans in the other direction, which is to say into the muck and mire that is the origin of all life.
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Paddock, Alexandra Angharad. "Beastly spaces : geomorphism in the literary depiction of animals." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2016. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:117bf706-74c4-4682-8ecb-36bc1af34562.
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In 2010, Simon Estok observed that, "the most immediate question ecocriticism can ask is about how our assumptions about animals affect the natural environment". In this thesis, I respond to this challenge by generating a sustained conversation between the hitherto surprisingly distinct fields of animal studies and ecocriticism. I do this by formulating a new critical concept, that of the geomorphic animal, which I use to show how literary representations of animals often expose the many complex ways in which they constitute space rather than simply inhabiting it. This, in turn, should make them central to future ecocritical readings. I focus on two periods, medieval and modern; the broad historical and generic scope of this thesis is intended to demonstrate the conceptual validity and robustness of geomorphic readings. Chapter One shows how concerns with death and symbiosis are expressed through the earth-bound activities of the geomorphic animals of the Exeter Book riddles. Chapter Two examines geomorphic whales in texts deriving from two related traditions: the Book of Jonah and the Physiologus. Chapters Three and Four focus on modern theatre, which affords distinctive ways of articulating the spatial implications of geomorphism. Chapter Three discusses the literary representation of museums and zoos in terms of the interpretative complexities generated by staging and spectacle. Chapter Four, focusing on mediation, discusses the interplay between animals, viewpoints and place in theatre, also taking into account particular issues arising from the adaptation of plays into films. This argument paves the way to addressing the geomorphic depiction of marginalised humans and human groups, suggesting the critical potential of geomorphism as a means of furthering feminist and post-colonialist aims.
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Cooper, Simon George Art College of Fine Arts UNSW. "Mutant manifesto: a response to the symbolic positions of evolution and genetic engineering within self perception." Publisher:University of New South Wales. Art, 2007. http://handle.unsw.edu.au/1959.4/44255.
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Believing that ideas about evolution and genetics are playing an increasing role in popular conceptions of who we are and what it means to be human, I sought ways to express this through my art. In particular I tried to articulate these notions through figurative sculpture. As the role of figurative sculpture in expressing current ideas about being human has declined in the West, I saw this as a challenge. It was the intent of my Masters program to reposition the sculpted body back within contemporary western cultural contexts. For an understanding of those contexts I relied heavily on my own culturally embedded experience and observations. I took as background my readings of evolutionary inspired literature and linked it with my interpretations of the genetic mythologies so prevalent in recent movies. The result was an image of contemporary humans as multifaceted, yet subservient to their genes. These genes appear to be easily manipulated and the product of technological intervention as much as, if not more than, inherited characteristics. As part of developing a sculptural form able to manifest this, I investigated some non-western traditions. I used field trips and residencies to research Buddhist and Hindu sculptures of the body and developed an interest in the spatial and conceptual relationships between those bodies. Through making figurative work in the studio, I came to realise the figures' inadequacy in expressing temporal relationships. As temporal change is a fundamental element of evolution and genetics, I needed to explore this element. The result was a number of series; groups of works that create their own context of relationships. Not all these groups use sculptures of the body but they evoke the notion of bodies, naturally or technologically hybridised, mutating, transforming, evolving and related to each other generationaly through time.
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Jordan, J. Kevin. "“The Nations of the Field and Wood”: The Uncertain Ontology of Animals in Eighteenth-Century British Literature." Scholar Commons, 2017. http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd/6716.
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This dissertation analyzes the relationship between important intellectual discourses of the late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries and the ontological status of non-human animals. The Enlightenment marks a distinct change in the ways in which humans gather knowledge and interact with the world, a change that forms the foundation for modern relationships between human and non-human animals. Through a theoretical framework that draws from animal studies and ecofeminism, I analyze the ways in which the status of non-human animals is shaped by the intersection of multiple anthropocentric concerns. In doing so, this dissertation probes the foundation of what defines the animal apart from the human. I use the metaphor of the chain of being to chart the relative ontological status of animals across multiple discursive paradigms and literary texts. The first chapter explores animal status within the changing epistemology of the Enlightenment. As humans rely on a combination of reason and sensory perceptions to know and describe the world, human reason becomes the source of human specialness and superiority. Rochester’s A Satyr Against Reason and Mankind questions the privileged status claimed by humans based upon the lauding of reason. Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko exposes the complex ramifications for animal status within a narrative that relies on sensory perceptions for its truth-making strategy. The next chapter analyzes animal status in relation to human aspiration. Pope’s Essay on Man urges humans to use their reason to restrain their ambitions. This results in a relatively secure ontological status for animals. However, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe celebrates human ambition, which results in a lower and more tenuous status for animals. I then turn to the status of animals within the emergence of natural philosophy. Plays by Shadwell and Centlivre include virtuosi, who act as comic practitioners of the new science. Though the plays use science as a source of comedy, they reinforce the strict species hierarchy that rests at the heart of Baconian science. The analysis then turns to Thomson’s The Seasons, which employs natural philosophy in a manner that establishes a more egalitarian relationship between human and non-human animals. The final chapter analyzes the ways in which Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels imbricates each of the three discourses discussed in the previous chapters. The overarching trend that emerges throughout this research is that in texts that celebrate the human and human potential, animals occupy a much lower status relative to humans. In texts where human nature and behavior are met with skepticism or downright pessimism, the distance between human and animal shrinks, and animals occupy a relative status that is higher than in more anthropocentrically optimistic texts.
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Moore, Erica Brown. "Practising the Posthumanities : evolutionary animals, machines and the posthuman in the fiction of J.G. Ballard and Kurt Vonnegut." Thesis, Cardiff University, 2011. http://orca.cf.ac.uk/23442/.
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This thesis demonstrates how selected texts by J.G. Ballard—Crash (1973), Concrete Island (1974) and High‐Rise 1975)—and Kurt Vonnegut—Player Piano (1952), Slaughterhouse‐Five(1969) and Galápagos (1985)—can be considered in terms of theoretical stances derived from posthumanism. By analysing representations of the ‘human’ in relation to both the ‘machine’ and the ‘evolutionary human animal’, this thesis illustrates the emergence of the posthuman subject. In addition, by recognising the intersection between posthumanism and evolutionary theory, a wider project of this thesis involves demonstrating how the use of various theoretical approaches, from the ‘humanities’ and the ‘sciences’, contributes to the formation of a ‘posthumanities’ approach to literature. J.G. Ballard and Kurt Vonnegut consistently present fictional scenarios in which the lines between ‘human’, ‘machine’ and ‘evolutionary animal’ are disrupted and blurred. Depictions assume various triangulations and configurations: from the protagonist Ballard’s auto‐eroticism, to the characters of High‐Rise conflating boundaries between the ‘human’ and the evolutionary animal that is conveyed as a constituent of human identity, as well as between the machinic environment and the human inhabitant. Further,comparable configurations characterise Vonnegut’s texts: Player Piano’s Paul Proteus’ war against the machine is superimposed by human affiliation with the machine, and the castaway characters of Galápagos are stranded by evolutionary forces that displace human authority and control to the uttermost limit. Each of these instances contributes to the effective intervention of posthumanist thinking when reading the texts. In addition, the utilisation of evolutionary concepts derived from contemporaneous publications circulating in the cultural and scientific sphere highlights the usefulness of acknowledging sources from beyond the remit of traditional literary studies’ methodologies when reading texts. The triangulation between literature, posthumanism and evolutionary theory results in a reconfigured methodological approach to fictional texts: the posthumanities.
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Spittler, Janet E. "Animals in the apocryphal acts of the Apostles the wild kingdom of early Christian literature." Tübingen Mohr Siebeck, 2007. http://d-nb.info/990292886/04.
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Sperens, Jenny. "Yeats, Myth and Mythical Method : A Close Reading of the Representations of Celtic and Catholic Mythology in “The Wanderings of Oisin”." Thesis, Umeå universitet, Institutionen för språkstudier, 2013. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:umu:diva-85074.
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“The Wanderings of Oisin” was published in 1889 and is one of W.B Yeats’ earliest poems and is the main focus for this essay. The poem depicts the duality of Irish identity and the transition from one system of belief to another. This essay will demonstrate that W.B Yeats uses Celtic and Catholic mythology in “The Wanderings of Oisin” in order to reflect his contemporary Ireland. The essay begins with a deifintion and a discussion about the words 'myth' and 'mythical method'. The second part of the essay describes the depiction of Celtic and Catholic mythology in “The Wanderings of Oisin” and the connection to late nineteenth century Ireland. The first section presents information on Irish nineteenth-century history and the second section focuses on five parallels to Yeats' contemporary society: The vitality of Celtic mythological beings, the depiction of Oisin as mediator, the sense of loss regarding Irish culture, the juxtaposition of Celtic and Catholic and the ambivalence that follows in a society where two conflicting mythologies coexist and compete. The main body of arguments discusses these parallels between Yeats’ portrayal of Celtic mythology and nineteenth century Ireland and shows that "The Wanderings of Oisin" reflects Yeats' contemporary Irish society.
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Eriksson, Erik. "Is it called she or he? : A study of pronoun use in relation to animals." Thesis, Örebro universitet, Institutionen för humaniora, utbildnings- och samhällsvetenskap, 2016. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:oru:diva-49731.
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Frank, Lauren Irene. "Plath's Animals Representations of Gender and Identity in the Writing of Sylvia Plath." Thesis, University of Canterbury. Culture, Literature and Society, 2007. http://hdl.handle.net/10092/1936.
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The purpose of this thesis is to establish how American writer Sylvia Plath utilizes the
non-human animal image to explore gender roles and identity. Despite the
overwhelming amount of criticism that has been dedicated to Plath's writing and life,
the use of non-human animals in her work has rarely been addressed. A primary focus
will be on the violence and aggression evident in a large amount of her poetry, much
of it aligned with gender and the non-human animal image. In examining the ways in
which Plath utilizes animals, a distinction becomes apparent between the majority of
her earlier writing and her later work. In Plath's earlier work, she typically uses
animals within a triangular model, where the animal's significance is determined by
the relationship between the male and female human protagonists. As her work
develops, there is an evident shift in the role and representation of the animal images
as they begin to depart from the earlier triangular model. In Plath's later work the
animal representations are aligned closely with the identities of the female figures.
Here, animals essentially take on a mythic, prosthetic role and enable the female
figures' transcendence towards a non-victim status. Plath's shifting representations of
the non-human animal acknowledge traditional gender dichotomies, but ultimately
undermine them.
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Milne, Anne. "'Lactilla tends her fav'rite cow' : domesticated animals and women in eighteenth-century British labouring-class women's poetry /." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 1999. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk1/tape9/PQDD_0029/NQ66225.pdf.
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Wang, Laura Li Ching. "Natural Law and the Law of Nature in Early British Beast Literature." Thesis, Harvard University, 2013. http://dissertations.umi.com/gsas.harvard:11234.
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In the tumultuous political environment of late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century Britain, animal literature saw rapid development and innovation. Beast fable and epic, which already had a long tradition in Latin and French, gained new vigor and popularity in English and Scots renditions. Simultaneously, a new strain of political theory appeared in the vernacular. This dissertation makes a tripartite argument about the relationship between these two discourses. First, writers of literature and political theory alike struggled to reconcile an optimistic view of human society, inherent in the prevailing philosophical tradition of natural law, with the widespread corruption they witnessed in ecclesiastical and royal courts. The fruits of this struggle were darkly humorous works of beast epic and fable in the former case, and pragmatic political theory in the latter. Second, because of its literary character, beast literature actually proved more adventurous than political theory in demonstrating how one might use dissimulation to dominate the predatory world of politics, and in showing the moral and linguistic exhaustion that could result from such manipulation of others. Third, as political writers adapted their theories to reflect politics as it was actually practiced, they explicitly turned to beast literature for images and exempla, so that the animal characters of Aesopian fable and Reynardian epic stealthily crept into works of serious political inquiry.
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Sciancalepore, Antonella. "Aspetti del teriomorfismo guerriero nella letteratura francese medievale (XII-XIII secolo)." Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2015. http://hdl.handle.net/1842/21710.
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Se dovessi esprimere in una sola frase le ragioni per intraprendere questa ricerca, probabilmente sceglierei le parole con cui Joyce Salisbury conclude la sua monografia sugli animali nel Medioevo: «we do not change our identity easily (…). In our definition of what it means to be human, it seems we cannot deny for long the beast within us» (Salisbury 1994: 178). L’identità animale è infatti una parte integrante dell’umanità, della quale non possiamo liberarci. Del resto, il concetto stesso di “animale” in opposizione a quello di “umano” non esiste; piuttosto, l'animale è da considerare una categoria relazionale, in opposizione alla quale l’uomo vorrebbe definire sé stesso: parlare di animale equivale a parlare del rapporto che l’uomo instaura con esso (Bonafin 1998: 237). È anche grazie agli animal studies che la definizione omogenea di animale è stata riconsiderata: quasi un ventennio di studi riguardanti il ruolo dell’animale nel dominio letterario, filosofico, storico e antropologico ha contribuito, infatti, a demistificare il discorso antropocentrico sull’animale e a smascherare la sua dimensione storica e relativa, e a evidenziare che l'essere umano stesso è il prodotto delle relazioni che gli umani hanno con gli altri personaggi della biocenosi (Steeves 2002: 239). Questa definizione relazionale sembrerebbe scaturire principalmente da una naturale familiarità dell’uomo con l'animale, nei confronti del quale l'uomo intesse una trama complessa di atteggiamenti, che Drevet condensa efficacemente in tre schemi principali: il rapporto di appropriazione (un esempio del quale è il modello venatorio), il rapporto di familiarizzazione (o di addomesticamento) e quello di utilizzazione (Drevet 1994: 17). Per Drevet è solo nel secondo rapporto, quello di addomesticamento, che l’uomo rende familiare l’animale, lo antropomorfizza, facendolo partecipare della propria natura (ibidem); tuttavia a me pare che anche gli altri due livelli comportino un grado di partecipazione nell'identità umana, interroghino la posizione dell'animale rispetto all'uomo, al suo spazio e al suo complesso di valori. Per questa ragione, l’animale – e il riconoscimento del beast within us, “l’animale dentro di noi” – interseca costantemente l’attività e il pensiero degli esseri umani: esso ci costringe a mettere quotidianamente in discussione il nostro concetto di umanità, in quanto individui e in quanto gruppo, e di volta in volta delinea, destabilizza e ridefinisce i confini tra Sé e l’Altro. Come ci possiamo probabilmente aspettare per un concetto così carico ideologicamente e simbolicamente, il rapporto con l’animale è sin dalle origini profondamente impregnato di religione (Barrau 1977: 578). Di esso si è occupato il Cristianesimo, che nei suoi primi secoli di storia ha avuto tra le sue principali preoccupazioni quella di alienare da sé forme di culti zoomorfi, desacralizzando e secolarizzando l’animale (Baratay 1998: 1441). Nel pensiero cristiano occidentale, il rapporto tra l’uomo e l’animale sembra difatti essere prevalentemente a sfavore di quest’ultimo: la tradizione dei Padri della Chiesa, da Agostino in poi, riconosce l’anima nella parte intellettuale dell’uomo, separando questa dalla corporeità e introducendo così una netta separazione tra l’uomo e l’animale, che, invece, non può possedere un’anima. Ne consegue una radicalizzazione dell’antropocentrismo nel Cristianesimo: già nella Genesi gli animali sono creati in funzione dell’uomo e all’uomo ne è dato il dominio completo, anche se questa dominazione non escludeva una collaborazione pacifica tra le due specie (Dittmar 2012a: 235); con il Nuovo Testamento e l’identificazione esplicita tra il demonio e il serpente o altri mostri teriomorfici, l’animale nella sua realtà corporea e nella sua dimensione istintuale diventa espressione demoniaca (Baratay 1998: 1434-40). Nel Cristianesimo medievale il concetto stesso di umano è dato in negativo, secondo quello che l’uomo non è: un esempio lampante è la definizione aristotelica ripresa da Agostino di uomo come animale razionale e mortale. Per questo i confini tra umanità e animalità costituiscono, nel Medioevo una questione particolarmente rilevante: dalla distinzione dall'animale dipende la definizione di umano, ma il problema non è soltanto distinguersi dall'animale sul livello fisiologico quanto su quello morale; a essere in gioco non è solo la frontiera esteriore, fisica, tra uomo e animale, ma anche la frontiera interiore, spirituale e morale (Bartholeyns et alii 2009: § 15). Non stupisce, perciò, che in questo contesto le trasformazioni e le ibridazioni uomo/animale siano considerate come una degradazione morale, o addirittura come una manifestazione diabolica, sia perché costituiscono una contaminazione con l’animale, sia per il fatto stesso di essere metamorfosi, segno inconfondibile del demonio (Brenot 1998: 1386-9). Tuttavia nel più vasto ambito della cultura medievale, pure così profondamente determinata dalla dottrina cristiana, il confine animale dell’umanità non si limita a essere il limite che separa l’uomo da un deprecabile stato di corruzione morale. Piuttosto, tale confine costituisce un luogo di negoziazione di opposti sistemi di pensiero, che dà luogo ad un’ampia gamma di attitudini: così superstizioni popolari e fede cristiana si intrecciano nelle storie sui lupi mannari, ammirazione e condanna si alternano nelle leggende di famiglie con antenati animali. Ciò è dovuto principalmente allo status ambiguo degli animali nell’orizzonte morale medievale: se tutte le bestie sono considerate irrazionali, perciò estranee a un giudizio morale, nei bestiari molti animali hanno una carica simbolica complessa, e quasi ognuno di questi può essere considerato virtuoso o vizioso a seconda dell’occasione. Ma un’altra ragione di questa ambiguità di giudizio è sicuramente il ruolo che gli animali continuavano a giocare nella vita economica e sociale del Medioevo: come l’agiografia ci ricorda con le sue tinte vivide, e come è stato confermato dalla storiografia, le occasioni di competizione e coesistenza più o meno forzata tra animali e uomini non erano rare, almeno fino all’Alto Medioevo (Ortalli 1985: 1393). Questa esperienza di contatto quotidiano stimolava nell'uomo medievale un’attenzione preferenziale nei confronti dell’incolto, e favoriva atteggiamenti improntati al rispetto e alla convivenza con la natura selvaggia (Montanari 1988: 60). La familiarità con l’incolto e con gli animali che lo abitavano, nonostante dopo l'anno Mille fosse in gran parte scomparsa nella realtà, continuò a costituire un fattore importante nella formazione dell’immaginario di diversi strati sociali. Un esempio di ciò è costituito dai bestiari: questi ci forniscono un’immagine dell’animale che va oltre il puro intento classificatorio, e ci restituiscono invece una trama di diversi livelli di conoscenza, «a knot in a tapestry of tales, observations, happenings» (Ingold 2012). Ciò è vero particolarmente per almeno una classe sociale, l’aristocrazia guerriera. Infatti, nella cultura della nobiltà feudale per tutto il Medioevo l’animale servì come principale risorsa di simboli e immagini. In particolare, gli animali erano pensati come modelli ideali e magici per il comportamento e per la pratica bellica: questo rapporto privilegiato dell’aristocrazia guerriera e la sua ideologia con l’animalità è dimostrato dall'importanza di riti e simboli feudocavallereschi incentrati sugli animali, come la pratica della caccia nobiliare, o il ricco repertorio teriomorfico dell’araldica – per non citarne che alcuni dei più vistosi.Tuttavia anche qui la relazione con il modello animale non era priva di ambiguità: l’aggressività del predatore, la sua sessualità irregolare, il suo comportamento asociale o addirittura antisociale, erano ammirati dai giovani cavalieri ma allo stesso tempo disapprovati dal loro ambiente sociale e dall’ideologia cavalleresca (Galloni 1993: 35-40). L’attitudine della classe guerriera medievale nei confronti dell’“animale interiore”, dunque, risulta in una doppia contraddizione: da una parte il generale conflitto di familiarità e paura verso gli animali e il selvatico, dall’altra la contraddizione specifica di ammirazione e condanna del comportamento animale nella costruzione dell’identità guerriera. Questa è la ragione per cui credo che valga la pena investigare più a fondo la rappresentazione dell’identità animale nella classe cavalleresca, e per cui ho scelto di farlo attraverso un approccio ai testi che sia filologico e antropologico assieme.
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Vandersommers, Daniel A. "Violence, Animals, and Egalitarianism: Audubon and the Intellectual Formation of Animal Rights in America." The Ohio State University, 2010. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1274056876.
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Cooper, Jessica. "The Roles of Women, Animals, and Nature in Traditional Japanese and Western Folk Tales Carry Over into Modern Japanese and Western Culture." Digital Commons @ East Tennessee State University, 2013. https://dc.etsu.edu/honors/166.
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The roles of women, animals, and nature in traditional Japanese and Western folk tales continue to be parallel to the roles of women, animals, and nature in modern Japanese and Western Culture. This is a result of the values and morals that are encapsulated within these folk tales.
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Grimes, Peter J. "Toadman and Other Encounters." University of Cincinnati / OhioLINK, 2011. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1313427174.
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LeMay, Megan Molenda. "Queering the Species Body: Interspecies Intimacies and Contemporary Literature." The Ohio State University, 2014. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1404733899.
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Denton-Edmundson, Matthew. "The Animal Life." Thesis, Virginia Tech, 2017. http://hdl.handle.net/10919/78391.
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This thesis puts forward a theory for a new basis of the rights and dignities of animals. The first chapter explains how the neurobiological output / input model can be applied to animal behavior, and suggests that animals—from fruit flies to chimpanzees—and humans are most similar in their desire to experiment with the world around them. The remaining chapters explore the practical implications of considering animals through the output / input model, using literature, the author’s personal experience, biological observations, and historical anecdotes. These chapters seek to prove that animals have much more to offer us than milk and meat.Master of Arts
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Bilancini, Anne. "The Most Delicate Parts: Stories." Miami University / OhioLINK, 2013. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=miami1377297997.
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