Publisher Description

In post-apartheid South Africa, a Zulu boy keeps secrets from his family as he cares for an injured dog and befriends the daughter of a white farmer.

Modernist literature might well be accused of going to the dogs. From the strays wandering the streets of Dublin in James Joyce’s Ulysses to the highbred canine subject of Virginia Woolf’s Flush, dogs populate a range of modernist texts. In many ways, the dog in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries became a potent symbol of the modern condition—facing, like the human species, the problem of adapting to modernizing forces that relentlessly outpaced it. Yet the dog in literary modernism does not function as a stand-in for the human. In this book, Karalyn Kendall-Morwick examines the human-dog relationship in modernist works by Virginia Woolf, Jack London, Albert Payson Terhune, J. R. Ackerley, and Samuel Beckett, among others. Drawing from the evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin and the scientific, literary, and philosophical work of Donna Haraway, Temple Grandin, and Carrie Rohman, she makes a case for the dog as a coevolutionary and coadapting partner of humans. As our coevolutionary partners, dogs destabilize the human: not the autonomous, self-transparent subject of Western humanism, the human is instead contingent, shaped by its material interactions with other species. By demonstrating how modernist representations of dogs ultimately mongrelize the human, this book reveals dogs’ status both as instigators of the crisis of the modern subject and as partners uniquely positioned to help humans adapt to the turbulent forces of modernization. Accessibly written and convincingly argued, this study shows how dogs challenge the autonomy of the human subject and the humanistic underpinnings of traditional literary forms. It will find favor with students and scholars of modernist literature and animal studies.

The Pug - A Complete Anthology of the Dog gathers together all the best early writing on the breed from our library of scarce, out-of-print antiquarian books and documents and reprints it in a quality, modern edition. This anthology includes chapters taken from a comprehensive range of books, many of them now rare and much sought-after works, all of them written by renowned breed experts of their day. These books are treasure troves of information about the breed - The physical points, temperaments, and special abilities are given; celebrated dogs are discussed and pictured; and the history of the breed and pedigrees of famous champions are also provided. The contents were well illustrated with numerous photographs of leading and famous dogs of that era and these are all reproduced to the highest quality. Books used include: House Dogs And Sporting Dogs by John Meyrick (1861), The Show Dog by H. W. Huntington (1901), The Dog Book by James Watson (1906) and many others.

The role of the dog in human society is the connecting thread that binds the essays in "Canis Africanis," each revealing a different part of the complex social history of southern Africa. The essays range widely from concerns over disease, bestiality, and social degradation through gambling on dogs to anxieties over social status reflected through breed classifications, and social rebellion through resisting the dog tax imposed by colonial authorities. With its focus on dogs in human history, this project is part of what has been termed the 'animal turn' in the social sciences, which investigates the spaces which animals inhabit in human society and the way in which animal and human lives interconnect, demonstrating how different human groups construct a range of identities for themselves (and for others) in terms of animals. So instead of conceiving of animals as merely constituents of ecological or agricultural systems, they can be comprehended through their role in human cultures.