Animality and Children's Literature and Film

by A. Ratelle

Overview

Examining culturally significant works of children's culture through a posthumanist, or animality studies lens, Animality and Children's Literature and Film argues that Western philosophy's objective to establish a notion of an exclusively human subjectivity is continually countered in the very texts that ostensibly work to this end.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781349476480
Publisher:	Palgrave Macmillan UK
Publication date:	11/27/2014
Series:	Critical Approaches to Children's Literature
Edition description:	1st ed. 2015
Pages:	171
Product dimensions:	5.51(w) x 8.50(h) x (d)

About the Author

Amy Ratelle is currently the Research Coordinator for the Semaphore Research Cluster on Mobile and Pervasive Computing, at the University of Toronto, Canada. She is also a Co-Investigator at Ryerson University's Children's Literature Archive. She has degrees in Film Studies from Ryerson University (BFA), and Carleton University (MA).

Table of Contents

Introduction 1. Animal Virtues, Values and Rights 2. Contact Zones, Becoming, and the Wild Animal Body 3. Ethics and Edibility 4. Science, Species and Subjectivity 5. Performance and Personhood in Free Willy and Dolphin Tale Conclusion End Notes Works Cited Index

Editorial Reviews

Ratelle’s book is the first comprehensive study of animals and the ways in which their narrative construction can offer revealing insights into human life and society. … A significant achievement of Animality and Children’s Literature and Film is that it sheds much-needed light on a topic that has so far evaded critical attention and will hopefully pave the way for more studies in the future.” (Victoria Flanagan, International Research in Children's Literature, Vol. 9 (1), July, 2016)

“Ratelle’s work is highly lucid, elegantly written, and that it offers a source of intrigu­ing examples and compassionate analyses and deconstructions of the animal-human divide in literary and cinematic classics … . Amy Ratelle’s valuable study compellingly excavates this historical development, but above all it demonstrates how literature and film for children havebeen and still are central to it.” (Pia Maria Ahlbäck, Journal of Childrens Literature Research, Vol. 38, 2015)

From the Publisher