Imperial beast fables : animals, cosmopolitanism, and the British Empire / Kaori Nagai.

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Imperial beast fables : animals, cosmopolitanism, and the British Empire / Kaori Nagai.

9783030514938 (electronic book)
3030514935 (electronic book)
3030514927
9783030514921

Cham, Switzerland : Palgrave Macmillan, [2020]

English

1 online resource.

10.1007/978-3-030-51

PN980 .N34 2020

398.24/509

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 Kiplings 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.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

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Description based on online resource; title from digital title page (viewed on August 20, 2020).

Palgrave studies in animals and literature.

Print version: 9783030514921

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