Review\nÉric Baratay’s biographical account of the backstory lives of famous animals is a vivid description of experiences and feelings from the animal’s point of view. The uniqueness and singularity of individual animals emerge in these 'restored stories,' encouraging a better understanding of the conditions and circumstances of actual animals. Clear, readable, and very engaging, this book is a splendid contribution to animal studies. -- Linda Kalof ― author of Looking at Animals in Human History\nAn attractive and original work. There isn’t anything much like it, and it should be of interest to scholars interested in animals in a range of humanistic disciplines, as well to general readers who share their interests. -- Harriet Ritvo ― author of Noble Cows and Hybrid Zebras: Essays on Animals and History\nWhat would we learn if animals could tell their own stories? Éric Baratay, a pioneering researcher in animal histories in France, applies his knowledge of historical methodologies to give voice to some of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries’ most interesting animals. He offers brief yet innovative accounts of these animals’ lives in a way that challenges the reader’s thinking about animals.\nBaratay illustrates the need to develop a nonanthropocentric means of viewing the lives of animals and including animals themselves in the narrative of their lives. Animal Biographies launches an all-new investigation into the lives of animals and is a major contribution to the field of animal studies.\nThis English translation of Éric Baratay’s Biographies animales: Des Vies retrouvées, originally published in France in 2017 (Éditions du Seuil), uses firsthand accounts starting from the nineteenth century about specific animals who lived in Europe and the United States to reconstruct, as best as possible, their stories as they would have experienced them. History is, after all, not just the domain of humans. Animals have their own.\nBaratay breaks the model of human exceptionalism to give us the biographies of some of history and literature’s most famous animals. The reader will catch a glimpse of storied lives as told by Modestine, the donkey who carried Robert Louis Stevenson through the Alps; Warrior, the World War I horse made famous in Steven Spielberg’s War Horse; Islero, the bull who gored Spain’s greatest bullfighter; and others. Through these stories we discover their histories, their personalities, and their shared experiences with others of their species.

Animal Biographies: Toward a History of Individuals (Animal Voices / Animal Worlds Ser.)

Baratay, Éric

Biographies & Memoirs

University of Georgia Press

Wild animals have fascinated human observers since time immemorial. The story of our interest in collecting, classifying and dominating Nature looms large; thus it is surprising that the history of menageries, zoological gardens and zoos as we know them today has been so poorly documented. This gap is addressed by Zoo. In the Renaissance, wealthy aristocrats showcased exotic beasts in private menageries. Safely caged, animals inspired the interest of naturalists and fed the curiosity of the masses. By the 19th century, increased urbanization and colonization aided the expansion of zoos in which animals were tamed to serve as domesticated livestock. Nowadays, with many natural habitats under threat of extinction, the social function of zoos is less clear. Such institutions both present the illusion of wild animals in a natural state to a nostalgic public and find themselves justifying their existence as saviors of endangered species.

Zoo: A History of Zoological Gardens in the West

History

Hardouin-Fugier, Elisabeth

World

Reaktion Books

Dictionnaire universel d'histoire naturelle de Charles d'Orb

Arts & Photography

FAGE

Les animaux historicisés: Pourquoi situer leurs comportements dans le temps et l'espace ?

ED SORBONNE

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