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Imaginary Animals: The Monstrous, the Wondrous and the Human Kindle Edition
This book shows how, despite their liminal role, griffins, dog-men, mermaids, dragons, unicorns, yetis and many other imaginary creatures are socially constructed through the same complex play of sensuality and imagination as ‘real’ ones. It traces the history of imaginary animals from Palaeolithic art to the Harry Potter stories and robotic pets. These figures help us psychologically by giving form to our amorphous fears as ‘monsters’, as well as embodying our hopes as ‘wonders’. Nevertheless, their greatest service may be to continually challenge our imaginations, directing us beyond the limitations of our conventional beliefs and expectations.
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherReaktion Books
- Publication dateOctober 28, 2013
- File size17245 KB
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Editorial Reviews
Review
“Speaking as someone fascinated by all animals from earliest childhood, I found Imaginary Animals to be an intriguing and thought-provoking discovery. Scholarly and well-researched, without being either ponderous or condescending, it is written with real wit, and with a contagious delight in its subject rare in such a study. I would recommend it enthusiastically to anyone interested in the astonishing range of folkloric, religious, cultural, philosophic and political symbolism with which human beings have regarded and ceaselessly recreated real animals in our time together on this planet.” ― Peter S. Beagle, author of "The Last Unicorn"
"You would have thought perhaps that the animal kingdom as it stands was rich enough to excite us and capture our interest, without us having to imagine our own beasts. Wildlife documentaries exploring from our back gardens to the other side of the world are reliable favorites on TV schedules. The animal kingdom is so rich and diverse that it’s easy to astonish even the most seasoned zoo-goer. And yet, in Imaginary Animals, Sax reels off countless examples of animals we have dreamt up ourselves. . . . Sax leads us on a ceaseless and generously illustrated museum tour from one fantastical example to another." ― Morning Star
About the Author
Product details
- ASIN : B00G2C2JDQ
- Publisher : Reaktion Books (October 28, 2013)
- Publication date : October 28, 2013
- Language : English
- File size : 17245 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Not Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 374 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #2,642,020 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #146 in Medieval Art
- #271 in Medieval Literary Criticism (Kindle Store)
- #2,597 in Folklore & Mythology
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
I have been, among other things, a human rights activist, an impoverished poet, a manual worker, an expert on online education, and a pioneer in Animal Studies.
I was raised on Communism, the grandest of grand narratives. it sought to explain everything but didn’t explain anything very well. I have always missed its dramatic sweep. I wanted big answers for the big questions. I wouldn’t accept the little ones and kept getting in trouble with my teachers.
My father had been a Soviet spy, passing atomic secrets, and the initial years of my life were spent with my nearly destitute family trying to shake the FBI by moving many times a year. My father, a Russian Jew, was impulsive, brilliant, loving, abusive, and seriously mentally ill. My mother, coming from a rather puritanical British background, saw him as a romantic rebel. She was drawn to the Civil Rights movement and was a co-founder of CORE (the Congress on Racial Equality), but the difficulties of survival overwhelmed her idealism. She held our family together with a sort of everyday heroism, and my parents divorced after 18 tempestuous years.
Rather than focusing exclusively on any specialty, I like to draw analogies between domains that appear very far apart. In the 1980s, when I began to write about literature, I was disappointed to discover that I had to spend far more time sorting through commentaries than with poems and stories. The topic of animals in literature and folklore was, however, relatively new. Browsing in used bookshops, I came across eighteenth and nineteenth century encyclopedias of animals, which were an uncharted world of comedy and romance, filled with turkeys that speak Arabic, beavers that build like architects, and dogs that solve murders. They revealed every bit as much about human society as about birds and beasts.
I started writing mostly about human-animal relations and never stopped. Indulging my fondness for paradoxes, I addressed subjects like Nazi animal protection, the modernity of the ravens in the Tower of London, and the Thanksgiving turkey as a sacrificial offering. As for trees, I think of them as just a kind of animal. By now, I have published roughly twenty books, which have been translated into many languages. I often violate academic protocols, not only by addressing broad themes but also by inserting humor and lyricism into my texts. I teach in the college program of the Sing Sing Correctional Facility and the graduate literature program of Mercy University.
There have been two constants in my somewhat untidy life. One is the support of my wife Linda, who has been with me over half a century and whom I cannot thank enough. The other is my writing, which I have worked on continually but am unable to judge. Thanks, reader, for reading this, and I hope you are inspired to read more.
Boria Sax
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Top reviews
Top reviews from the United States
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He makes come telling points. He writes that a dog may think of itself in terms of smells, and a bat may think of itself in terms of sounds, and we humans in terms of language.
The book explores Greek and Roman myth, myths of tribal peoples all over the place, the dragon and phoenix in China and Japan, and some Hindu tales and legends. The illustrations are from all these. Several of the Hindu illustrations are remarkable and so is an early 1900s Rosicrucian image, all these appearing to me to be like icons, full of symbols to be read slowly and with thought. Some of the 19th century images from Japan are stunning, including one by Hokusai. There are several Russian popular prints from the 1700s. Throughout the book there are many examples of the work of Grandville (French), that are simply wonderful--somebody please, please write a book about him!
One chapter discusses alchemists' use of imagery utilizing imaginary animals as symbols of elements and their states of stable or unstable, a sort of complex graphic code not unlike religious images.
This is a thought-provoking read. I think the first 2/3 of the book are better reading than the last third, but the illustrations are esxceltional all the way through.
Joann Karges
Top reviews from other countries
In this volume, he turns his attention to animals that have never existed (we think..), but with which, one way or another, we are all familiar - the unicorn, griffin, phoenix and wyvern, for instance. Monsters fill the pages.
The book is a nice size (it is quite substantial); it is well printed and illustrated and seems a joy to read either by dipping in or in larger chunks; it is reasonably priced and neatly fills a gap in the literature, hovering between history, mythology, natural history, religion, and heraldry - some achievement.