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.

Cosmopolitan Animals asks what new possibilities and permutations of cosmopolitanism can emerge by taking seriously our sharing and 'becoming-with' animals. It calls for a fresh awareness that animals are important players in cosmopolitics, and that worldliness is far from being a human monopoly.

Japanese fairy tales - enchanting, enigmatic stories of animals, human beings and the great natural world. Dark and innocent, sublime and whimsical, Miyazawa's stories have the ageless feel of the best fairy tales. There are animal allegories such as 'The Ungrateful Rat' where a rude rodent insults all the objects he meets - until he meets the Rat Trap/ There are morality tales such as 'The Restaurant of Many Orders', where two hunters become the hunted. There are also transcendent stories of childhood and mortality like Miyazawa's best-known 'Night Train to the Stars', where a magical steam train carries children through the night and up to the heavens. These stories reveal the unique brilliance of one of Japan's most beloved early twentieth-century writers. WITH A FOREWORD BY DAVID MITCHELL AND AN INTRODUCTION BY KAORI NAGAI 'Kenji Miyazawa fables are international-class' David Mitchell 'For readers who relish the disturbing material of fairy tale, the specificity and surprise of tanka, collisions of the everyday with the supernatural and glimpses of Japan right on the brink of industrialization, Kenji Miyazawa's masterly stories will be a delight' New York Times 'Few works have given me so much pleasure (and hard work) as the tales of Miyazawa Kenji [...] more genuine originality, and a more universal appeal, than almost anything else I have done.' John Bester, translator

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.

The narrator is a scientist hideously deformed in a laboratory accident - a man who has lost his face and, with it, connection to other people. Even his wife is now repulsed by him. His only entry back into the world is to create a mask so perfect as to be undetectable. But soon he finds that such mask is more than a disguise: it is an alternate self - a self that is capable of anything. A remorseless meditation on nature, identity, and the social contract, THE FACE OF ANOTHER is an intellectual horror story of the highest order.

This volume explores nonhuman animals’ involvement with human maritime activities in the age of sail—as well as the myriad multispecies connections formed across different geographical locations knitted together by the long history of global ship movement. Far from treating the ship as a confined space defined by the sea, Maritime Animals considers the ship’s connections to broader contexts and networks and covers a variety of locations, from the Canadian Arctic to the Pacific Islands. Each chapter focuses on the oceanic experiences of a particular species, from ship vermin, animals transported onboard as food, and animal specimens for scientific study to livestock, companion and working animals, deep-sea animals that find refuge in shipwrecks, and terrestrial animals that hunker down on flotsam and jetsam. Drawing on recent scholarship in animal studies, maritime studies, environmental humanities, and a wide range of other perspectives and storytelling approaches, Maritime Animals challenges an anthropocentric understanding of maritime history. Instead, this volume highlights the ways in which species, through their interaction with the oceans, tell stories and make histories in significant and often surprising ways. In addition to the editor, the contributors to this volume include Anna Boswell, Nancy Cushing, Lea Edgar, David Haworth, Donna Landry, Derek Lee Nelson, Jimmy Packham, Laurence Publicover, Killian Quigley, Lynette Russell, Adam Sundberg, and Thom van Dooren.

"Who is Kim?" and "Why is he Irish?"--This book sheds light on this post-colonial riddle by placing it within a web of colonial analogies that existed to create the British Empire as a "reality." It characterizes "Empire" as a discursive battleground in which conflicting and changing models of British hegemony coexisted and were constantly contested.Starting from the analysis of the Irish characters in Kipling s Indian stories, this book shows that the representation of the British Empire was greatly indebted to analogies and comparisons made between colonies, and as such became the very site where the image of Empire was contested. It contrasts two different ways of making colonial analogies; "imperialist" and "nationalist." Kipling, as a young journalist, was keenly aware of the fact that Indian and Irish nationalists drew analogies between each other s colonial situation to make the case for self-government and British misrule, and his repeated emphasis on Irish participation in the Raj can be seen as a powerful "imperialist" counter-representation to these subversive analogies. With this framework in mind, this book traces how Kipling s representation of Empire changed over time as he moved away from India and also as the hegemony of British imperialism faltered toward the end of the nineteenth century. It argues that this change roughly corresponds with the transformation of Mulvaney: Kim is characteristically made voiceless as an Irish subject, who does not miss Ireland as home. Furthermore, the book shows how Kipling s new version of the white man s world, that is, of the Settler s Empire, is palimpsested onto Kim, which makes the novel radically different from his earlier representation of the Raj."Empire of Analogies" is primarily aimed at scholars and students who are interested in such topics as Rudyard Kipling, postcolonial literature and history, nineteenth-century Irish history and culture, British India, and the larger question of the British Empire. Scholars who are working on trans-colonial models of the British Empire, and/or the use of comparative models in postcolonial studies, would find this book particularly interesting. "Empire of Analogies" has special relevance to courses in Colonial/Postcolonial literature and Victorian Studies, dealing with topics such as empire and literature, British India, nineteenth Irish history and diaspora, the Boer War, the Settler colonies, and transcolonialsm/nationalism. Many of these courses list Rudyard Kipling s "Kim" as one of the main texts."