Description |
1 online resource (xvi, 278 pages) : illustrations, map |
Series |
Book collections on Project MUSE
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Contents |
The novel as zoo: animal stories and English style -- Picturing Britannia's menagerie: the aesthetics of the imperial whole -- Circuses in cabinets: the Victorian novelist as beast tamer -- Elephants in the labyrinth of empire: Arnold Bennett, modernism, and the menagerie -- Monsters on the verandah of realism: Virginia Woolf's empire exhibition -- The "Anglepoised" novel after empire: English creatures and postcolonial exhibition -- Small islands, frozen arks |
Summary |
"The first comprehensive account of the relation of collections of imperial beasts to narrative practices in England, The Novel and the Menagerie explores an array of imaginative responses to the empire as a dominant, shaping factor in English daily life. Kurt Koenigsberger argues that domestic English novels and collections of zoological exotica (especially zoos, circuses, traveling menageries, and colonial and imperial exhibitions) share important aesthetic strategies and cultural logics: novels about English daily life and displays featuring collections of exotic animals both strive to relate Englishness to a larger empire conceived as an integrated whole." "Koenigsberger's investigations range from readings of novels by authors such as Charles Dickens, Virginia Woolf, Salman Rushdie, and Angela Carter to analyses of ballads, handbills, broadsides, and memoirs of showmen. Attending closely to the collective English practices of imagining and delineating the empire as a whole, The Novel and the Menagerie works at the juncture of literary criticism, colonial discourse studies, and cultural analysis to historicize the notion of totality in the theory and practice of the English novel. In exploring the shapes of the novel in England and of the English institutions that collected exotic animals, it offers fresh readings of familiar literary texts and opens up new ways of understanding the character of imperial Englishness across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries."--Jacket |
Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references (pages 245-259) and index |
Notes |
Master and use copy. Digital master created according to Benchmark for Faithful Digital Reproductions of Monographs and Serials, Version 1. Digital Library Federation, December 2002. http://purl.oclc.org/DLF/benchrepro0212 MiAaHDL |
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Print version record |
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digitized 2010 HathiTrust Digital Library committed to preserve pda MiAaHDL |
Subject |
English fiction -- 19th century -- History and criticism
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English fiction -- 20th century -- History and criticism
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National characteristics, English, in literature.
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Identity (Philosophical concept) in literature.
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Whole and parts (Philosophy) in literature.
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Literature and society -- Great Britain -- History -- 19th century
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Literature and society -- Great Britain -- History -- 20th century
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Social institutions in literature.
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Imperialism in literature.
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LITERARY CRITICISM -- General.
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English fiction
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Identity (Philosophical concept) in literature
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Imperialism in literature
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Literature and society
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National characteristics, English, in literature
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Social institutions in literature
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Whole and parts (Philosophy) in literature
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Nationalkaraktär i litteraturen.
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Nationell identitet i litteraturen.
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Engelsk litteratur -- historia -- 1800-talet.
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Engelsk litteratur -- historia -- 1900-talet.
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Great Britain
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Genre/Form |
Criticism, interpretation, etc.
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History
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Form |
Electronic book
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LC no. |
2007000236 |
ISBN |
9780814272282 |
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0814272282 |
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