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It is widely known that such Western institutions as the museum,
the university, and the penitentiary shaped Japan's emergence as a
modern nation-state. Less commonly recognized is the role played by
the distinctly hybrid institution-at once museum, laboratory, and
prison-of the zoological garden. In this eye-opening study of
Japan's first modern zoo, Tokyo's Ueno Imperial Zoological Gardens,
opened in 1882, Ian Jared Miller offers a refreshingly
unconventional narrative of Japan's rapid modernization and
changing relationship with the natural world. As the first
zoological garden in the world not built under the sway of a
Western imperial regime, the Ueno Zoo served not only as a staple
attraction in the nation's capital-an institutional marker of
national accomplishment-but also as a site for the propagation of a
new "natural" order that was scientifically verifiable and
evolutionarily foreordained. As the Japanese empire grew, Ueno
became one of the primary sites of imperialist spectacle, a
microcosm of the empire that could be traveled in the course of a
single day. The meaning of the zoo would change over the course of
Imperial Japan's unraveling and subsequent Allied occupation. Today
it remains one of Japan's most frequently visited places. But
instead of empire in its classic political sense, it now bespeaks
the ambivalent dominion of the human species over the natural
environment, harkening back to its imperial roots even as it asks
us to question our exploitation of the planet's resources.
Responding to the global decolonization of the last five decades,
and employing the crucial concept of macropolitics, the authors
explore the relations between politics and culture that defined the
era of colonization.
An exploration of the various ways animals and their relations to
humans have been depicted throughout the ages. This volume delves
into the realm between representative images and real animals. It
is a historical inquiry into human interaction with the animals we
eat, pamper, experiment on, and imagine, as they have been
variously domesticated, slaughtered, loved, studied, and made into
icons of human invention. Common assumptions and experiences with
animals have entered into the functioning and conceptualizing of
life, yet these are historically and culturally contingent. The
essays in this volume unveil the ways in which human-animal
relationships reveal the interhuman structures of the cultures in
which they are formed. By using animals as a lens, they refocus our
awareness of the ways in which humans have allotted resources,
gathered knowledge, and structured families. The treatment of
animals is often a guide to the treatment of people within a
society, while the perceived 'stewardship' of humans over animals
has helped shape the broader environment that both human and
nonhuman animals share. The authors tackle their subject from a
variety of levels -- popular, scientific, and economic. The essays
explore the vast borderland between human ideas and physical nature
regarding animal representation. Contributors include Richard W.
Burkhardt, Jr., Jonathan Burt, Ken C. Erickson, Katherine C. Grier,
Richard C. Hoffmann, Andrew C. Isenberg, JacquelineMilliet, John
Solomon Otto, Karen A. Rader, Harriet Ritvo, Nigel Rothfels,
Kenneth J. Shapiro, and Edward I. Steinhart. Mary Henninger-Voss is
an Associate of the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical
Studies, Princeton University.
Located in the heart of England's Lake District, the placid waters
of Thirlmere seem to be the embodiment of pastoral beauty. But
under their calm surface lurks the legacy of a nineteenth-century
conflict that pitted industrial progress against natural
conservation - and helped launch the environmental movement as we
know it. Purchased by the city of Manchester in the 1870s,
Thirlmere was dammed and converted into a reservoir, its water
piped one hundred miles south to the burgeoning industrial city and
its workforce. This feat of civil engineering - and of natural
resource diversion - inspired one of the first environmental
struggles of modern times. "The Dawn of Green" re-creates the
battle for Thirlmere and the clashes between conservationists who
wished to preserve the lake and developers eager to supply the
needs of a growing urban population. Bringing to vivid life the
colorful and strong-minded characters who populated both sides of
the debate, noted historian Harriet Ritvo revisits notions of the
natural promulgated by romantic poets, recreationists, resource
managers, and industrial developers to establish Thirlmere as the
template for subsequent - and continuing - environmental struggles.
It is widely known that such Western institutions as the museum,
the university, and the penitentiary shaped Japan's emergence as a
modern nation-state. Less commonly recognized is the role played by
the distinctly hybrid institution - at once museum, laboratory, and
prison - of the zoological garden. In this eye-opening study of
Japan's first modern zoo, Tokyo's Ueno Imperial Zoological Gardens,
opened in 1882, Ian Jared Miller offers a refreshingly
unconventional narrative of Japan's rapid modernization and
changing relationship with the natural world. As the first
zoological garden in the world not built under the sway of a
Western imperial regime, the Ueno Zoo served not only as a staple
attraction in the nation's capital - an institutional marker of
national accomplishment - but also as a site for the propagation of
a new "natural" order that was scientifically verifiable and
evolutionarily foreordained. As the Japanese empire grew, Ueno
became one of the primary sites of imperialist spectacle, a
microcosm of the empire that could be traveled in the course of a
single day. The meaning of the zoo would change over the course of
Imperial Japan's unraveling and subsequent Allied occupation. Today
it remains one of Japan's most frequently visited places. But
instead of empire in its classic political sense, it now bespeaks
the ambivalent dominion of the human species over the natural
environment, harkening back to its imperial roots even as it asks
us to question our exploitation of the planet's resources.
When we think about the Victorian age, we usually envision people
together with animals: the Queen and her pugs, the sportsman with
horses and hounds, the big game hunter with his wild kill, the
gentleman farmer with a prize bull. Harriet Ritvo here gives us a
vivid picture of how animals figured in English thinking during the
nineteenth century and, by extension, how they served as metaphors
for human psychological needs and sociopolitical aspirations.
Victorian England was a period of burgeoning scientific cattle
breeding and newly fashionable dog shows; an age of Empire and big
game hunting; an era of reform and reformers that saw the birth of
the Royal SPCA. Ritvo examines Victorian thinking about animals in
the context of other lines of thought: evolution, class structure,
popular science and natural history, imperial domination. The
papers and publications of people and organizations concerned with
agricultural breeding, veterinary medicine, the world of pets,
vivisection and other humane causes, zoos, hunting at home and
abroad, all reveal underlying assumptions and deeply held
convictions-for example, about Britain's imperial enterprise,
social discipline, and the hierarchy of orders, in nature and in
human society. Thus this book contributes a new new topic of
inquiry to Victorian studies; its combination of rhetorical
analysis with more conventional methods of historical research
offers a novel perspective on Victorian culture. And because
nineteenth-century attitudes and practices were often the ancestors
of contemporary ones, this perspective can also inform modern
debates about human-animal interactions.
"Cats is 'dogs,' and rabbits is 'dogs,' and so's parrots; but this
`ere 'tortis' is a insect," a porter explains to an astonished
traveler in a nineteenth-century Punch cartoon. Railways were not
the only British institution to schematize the world. This
enormously entertaining book captures the fervor of the Victorian
age for classifying and categorizing every new specimen, plant or
animal, that British explorers and soldiers and sailors brought
home. As she depicts a whole complex of competing groups deploying
rival schemes and nomenclatures, Harriet Ritvo shows us a society
drawing and redrawing its own boundaries and ultimately identifying
itself. The experts (whether calling themselves naturalists,
zoologists, or comparative anatomists) agreed on their superior
authority if nothing else, but the laymen had their say--and Ritvo
shows us a world in which butchers and artists, farmers and showmen
vied to impose order on the wild profusion of nature. Sometimes
assumptions or preoccupations overlapped; sometimes open
disagreement or hostility emerged, exposing fissures in the social
fabric or contested cultural territory. Of the greatest interest
were creatures that confounded or crossed established categories;
in the discussions provoked by these mishaps, monstrosities, and
hybrids we can see ideas about human society--about the sexual
proclivities of women, for instance, or the imagined hierarchy of
nations and races. A thoroughly absorbing account of taxonomy--as
zoological classification and as anthropological study--The
Platypus and the Mermaid offers a new perspective on the constantly
shifting, ever suggestive interactions of scientific lore, cultural
ideas, and the popular imagination.
Increasingly in the last decade, macropolitics--a consideration of
political transformations at the level of the state--has become a
focus for cultural inquiry. From the macropolitical perspective
afforded by contemporary postcolonial studies, the essays in this
collection explore the relationship between politics and culture by
examining developments in a wide range of nineteenth-century
writing.
The dozen essays gathered here span the entire era of colonization
and discuss the British Isles, Europe, the United States, India,
the Caribbean, and Africa. Addressing the works of Wordsworth,
Shelley, Dickens, Melville, Flaubert, Conrad, and Charlotte Bronte,
as well as explorers' reports, Bible translations, popular theater,
and folklore, the contributors consider such topics as the
political function of aesthetic containment, the redefinitions of
nationality under the pressure of imperial ambition, and the
coexistence of imperial and revolutionary tendencies. New
historical data and new interpretive perspectives alter our
conception of established masterpieces and provoke new
understandings of the political and cultural context within which
these works emerged. This anthology demonstrates that the
macropolitical concept of imperialism can provide a new
understanding of nineteenth-century cultural production by
integrating into a single process the well-established topics of
nationalism and exoticism.
First published in 1991 (University of Pennsylvania Press),
Macropolitics of Nineteenth-Century Literature is now available in
paperback. Offering agenda-setting essays in cultural and Victorian
studies, it will be of interest to students and scholars of British
and American literature, literary theory, and colonial and
postcolonial studies.Contributors. Jonathan Arac, Chris Bongie,
Wai-chee Dimock, Bruce Greenfield, Mark Kipperman, James F. Knapp,
Loren Kruger, Lisa Lowe, Susan Meyer, Jeff Nunokawa, Harriet Ritvo,
Marlon B. Ross, Nancy Vogeley, Sue Zemka
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