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Imperial Beast Fables: Animals, Cosmopolitanism, and the British Empire

Nagai, Kaori (2020) Imperial Beast Fables: Animals, Cosmopolitanism, and the British Empire. Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature . Palgrave Macmillan, 252 pp. ISBN 978-3-030-51492-1. E-ISBN 978-3-030-51493-8. (doi:10.1007/978-3-030-51493-8) (The full text of this publication is not currently available from this repository. You may be able to access a copy if URLs are provided) (KAR id:82410)

The full text of this publication is not currently available from this repository. You may be able to access a copy if URLs are provided. (Contact us about this Publication)
Official URL:
https://www.palgrave.com/gb/book/9783030514921

Abstract

This book coins the term ‘imperial beast fable’ to explore modern forms of human-animal relationships and their origins in the British Empire. Taking as a starting point the long nineteenth-century fascination with non-European beast fables, it examines literary reworkings of these fables, such as Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Books, in relation to the global politics of race, language, and species. The imperial beast fable figures variably as a key site where the nature and origins of mankind are hotly debated; an emerging space of conservation in which humans enclose animals to manage and control them; a cage in which an animal narrator talks to change its human jailors; and a vision of animal cosmopolitanism, in which a close kinship between humans and other animals is dreamt of. Written at the intersection of animal studies and postcolonial studies, this book proposes that the beast fable embodies the ideologies and values of the British Empire, while also covertly critiquing them. It therefore finds in the beast fable the possibility that the multitudinous animals it gives voice to might challenge the imperial networks which threaten their existence, both in the nineteenth century and today.

Item Type: Book
DOI/Identification number: 10.1007/978-3-030-51493-8
Subjects: P Language and Literature > PJ Oriental philology and literature
P Language and Literature > PR English literature
Divisions: Divisions > Division of Arts and Humanities > School of English
Funders: Leverhulme Trust (https://ror.org/012mzw131)
Royal Museums Greenwich (https://ror.org/05qbj3p45)
Depositing User: Kaori Nagai
Date Deposited: 11 Aug 2020 16:37 UTC
Last Modified: 12 Jul 2022 10:41 UTC
Resource URI: https://kar.kent.ac.uk/id/eprint/82410 (The current URI for this page, for reference purposes)

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