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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... argues that in the second half of the nineteenth century the most power- ful influence on Americans ' understanding of their affinities with animals was not increasing separation from the pastoral and the wilder- ness ; instead , it was ...
... argues that understanding the dynamic relationship be- tween people's lived relations with animals and the multiple , species - specific , and often markedly affective discourses relating to these animals is essential for understanding ...
... arguing that it was possible to possess a modified or muted form of that vague loathing for conventional life expressed so ardently by Ishmael in the opening of Moby Dick ( 1851 ) even if you lived— by choice or necessity — within the ...
... argues that the " the problem of American self - recognition " in the nineteenth century was " an essentially ... argue , “ Yet Whitman , Thoreau , and Melville speak for this society , and to it , in great part because , by making ...
... argues that the most important product of humans ' custodial relationships with animals was the development of the psychological qualities essential to civilization . He writes : " Although no discreet person will venture to determine ...
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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 |