Civilized Creatures: Urban Animals, Sentimental Culture, and American Literature, 1850–1900JHU Press, 2005 M08 4 - 229 pages In Civilized Creatures, Jennifer Mason challenges some of our most enduring ideas about how encounters with nonhuman nature shaped American literature and culture. Mason argues that in the second half of the nineteenth century the most powerful influence on Americans' understanding of their affinities with animals was not increasing separation from the pastoral and the wilderness; instead, it was the population's feelings about the ostensibly civilized animals they encountered in their daily lives. Americans of diverse backgrounds, Mason shows, found it attractive as well as politic to imagine themselves as most closely connected to those creatures who shared humans' aptitude for civilized life. And to the minds of many in this period, national prosperity depended less on periodic exposure to untamed, wild nature than it did on the proper care and keeping of such animals within suburban and urban environments. Combining literary analysis with cultural histories of equestrianism, petkeeping, and the animal welfare movement, Civilized Creatures offers new readings of works by Susan Warner, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Charles W. Chesnutt. In each case, Mason demonstrates that understanding contemporary relationships between humans and animals is essential for understanding the debates about gender, race, and cultural power enacted in these texts. |
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... John Seaverns shared with me their extensive knowledge of books on the horse , and they each intro- duced me to texts that became important sources in this project . I would also like to thank my research assistants Naomi Gutierrez and ...
... essayist was not Thoreau but John Burroughs , whose writings were praised most often by contemporaries for their " home - like ” quality . ' As late as the middle of the twentieth century , LIFE IN THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT 5.
... John Humphreys as " brutal horse- beater , " however , have little grounding in the nineteenth - century horseman- ship on which Warner drew . Although for centuries horses in Western culture had been associated with human passions and ...
... John Jacob Astor and the builders of railroads gave little thought to the healing virtues of the forests and swamps they were defiling " ( 201 ) . However , Astor did ( along with Horace Greeley , George Bancroft , and Mayor Hoffman ) ...
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Enterprising Youth: Social Values and Acculturation in Nineteenth-century ... Monika Maria Elbert No preview available - 2008 |
For the Love of Animals: The Rise of the Animal Protection Movement Kathryn Shevelow No preview available - 2008 |