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.

Preliminary Material -- Critical Appropriations and Hermeneutic Resistance -- Penetration: Dusklands and In the Heart of the Country -- Resistance: Waiting for the Barbarians -- Parasitism: Life and Times of Michael K and Age of Iron -- Visitation: Disgrace -- Secrecy: Foe -- (Un)belonging: Boyhood, Youth, and Summertime -- Intrusion: The Master of Petersburg and Slow Man -- Fidelities: Elizabeth Costello and Diary of a Bad Year -- Works Cited -- Index.

Despite Kipling's popularity as an author and his standing as a politically controversial figure, much of his work has remained relatively unexamined due to its characterization as 'children's literature'. Sue Walsh challenges the apparently clear division between 'children's' and 'adult' literature, and poses important questions about how these strict categories have influenced critical work on Kipling and on literature in general. For example, why are some of Kipling's books viewed as children's literature, and what critical assumptions does this label produce? Why is it that Kim is viewed by critics as transcending attempts at categorization? Using Kipling as a case study, Walsh discusses texts such as Kim, The Jungle Books, the Just-So Stories, Puck of Pook's Hill, and Rewards and Fairies, re-evaluating earlier critical approaches and offering fresh readings of these relatively neglected works. In the process, she suggests new directions for postcolonial and childhood studies and interrogates the way biographical criticism on children's literature in particular has tended to supersede and obstruct other kinds of readings.

Argues for an innovative and overdue posthuman reading of African postcolonial literature

R.K. Narayan’s reputation as one of the founding figures of Indian writing in English is re-examined in this comprehensive study of his fiction, which offers detailed readings of all his novels. Arguing against views that have seen Narayan as a chronicler of “authentic” Indianness, John Thieme locates his fiction in terms of its specific South Indian contexts and cultural geography and its non-Indian intertexts. The study also considers the effect that Narayan’s writing for overseas publication had on novels such as Swami and Friends, The Guide and The Man-Eater of Malgudi. Narayan’s imaginary small town of Malgudi has often been seen as a metonym for India. Thieme draws on recent thinking about the ways in which place and space are constructed to demonstrate that Malgudi is always a fractured and transitional site, an interface between older conceptions of Indianness and contemporary views that stress the ubiquitousness and inescapability of change in the face of modernity. The study also shows that Malgudi is seen from varying angles of vision and with shifting emphases at different points in Narayan’s career. As well as offering fresh insights into the influences that went into the making of Narayan’s fiction, this is the most wide-ranging and authoritative guide to his novels to have appeared to date. It provides a unique account of his development as a writer.

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.

This book examines how ideas about place and space have been transformed in recent decades. It offers a unique understanding of the ways in which postcolonial writers have contested views of place as fixed and unchanging and are remapping conceptions of world geography, with chapters on cartography, botany and gardens, spice, ecologies, animals and zoos, and cities, as well as reference to the importance of archaeology and travel in such debates. Writers whose work receives detailed attention include Amitav Ghosh, Derek Walcott, Jamaica Kincaid, Salman Rushdie, Michael Ondaatje and Robert Kroetsch. Challenging both older colonial and more recent global constructions of place, the book argues for an environmental politics that is attentive to the concerns of disadvantaged peoples, animal rights and ecological issues. Its range and insights make it essential reading for anyone interested in the changing physical and human geography of the contemporary world.