Kaori Nagai

"Explores nonhuman animals' involvement with human maritime activities in the age of sail, presenting the ship as a place where the ocean and animal species interact in often surprising ways"--

Ships, Species, Stories

Maritime Animals

"Empire of anlaogies examines Kipling's representation of the Irish in his Indian stories, while tracing his changing views of the Empire as the hegemony of British imperialism faltered towards the end of the nineteenth century. It raises an important question regarding the place of Ireland in the Empire, namely, why do his Irish characters, especially the eponymous hero of Kim, have to be represented in India? Empire of analogies seeks to answer this colonial riddle by placing it within the context of the imperial connections between British colonies. It argues that Indo-Irish analogies and comparisons became especially important in representing imperial integrity in the late nineteenth century, and, as such, became the very site where the image of the British Empire was contested." --book jacket.

Kipling, India and Ireland

Empire of Analogies

Donna Landry

Karen Jones

Charlotte Sleigh

Caroline Rooney

Monica Mattfeld

Cosmopolitan Animals asks what new possibilities and permutations of cosmopolitanism can emerge by taking seriously our sharing and 'becoming-with' animals. It calls for a fresh awareness that animals are important players in cosmopolitics, and that worldliness is far from being a human monopoly.

Cosmopolitan Animals

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.

Kaori Nagai

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