CONTENTS:- I. Lapine selves and Simian others: 2. The tale of an English rabbit: gender and nation in Beatrix Potter. 3. Re-reading nation in Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book. II. Queer Wolves and black stallions: 4. Race, passing and wolf-dogs in Jack London's fiction. 5. Ernest Thompson Seton's animal nation. III. Tamed lionesses and wild curiosities: 6. The Fallacy of domestication in Joy Adamson's Born Free. 7. Gerald Durrell and the colonial animal. IV. Hybrid canines and more simian others: 8. Postcolonial dogs in the works of Percy FitzPatrick and J.M. Coetzee. 9. Racialized animals in Bernard Malamud’s God's Grace and Paul Auster's Timbuktu.
DESCRIPTION
This book offers provocative new readings of animal narratives that have changed the way we think about animals, writing and postcoloniality. It is contended that animal tales are much more complex and political than is generally assumed. By discussing several well-known animal tales by canonical and popular writers in their cultural and historical context, it is argued that animal writing enters the contested terrain of ‘human’ values and ideologies, and that many famous nineteenth-and twentieth-century animal narratives address questions of race, gender and nation.
This volume consists of an introduction and eight chapters dealing with the representation of the animal in postcolonial contexts that seek to demonstrate as to how postcolonial theories can be brought to bear upon narratives usually read in a more conventional manner. The authors studied include Beatrix Potter, Rudyard Kipling, Jack London, Ernest Thompson Seton, Percy FitzPatrick, Joy Adamson, Gerald Durrell, J.M. Coetzee, Bernard Malamud and Paul Auster.
