The semiotics of animal representations / / edited by Kadri Tüür and Morten Tønnessen.

• Superior document: Nature, culture, and literature ; 10
• TeilnehmendeR: Tüür, Kadri.; Tønnessen, Morten, 1976-
• Place / Publishing House: Amsterdam : : Rodopi,, 2014.
• Year of Publication: 2014
• Language: English
• Series: Nature, Culture and Literature 10.
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (376 pages) :; illustrations.

The ways in which we represent animals say much about who we are, who we strive to be, and our often conflicting ideas about our relationships with nonhuman species. Whether the animal is seen as someone with whom we can relate and feel kinship or conceived of as the radical other, popular cultural descriptions of animals are often – if not always – indirect descriptions of ourselves. The contributions to this volume offer a unique panorama of academic and literary approaches, demonstrating that an analysis of cultural representations and constructions of animals is indispensable for a better understanding of the interface of human culture and the so-called animal world.

Table of Contents

Preliminary Material -- The semiotics of animal representations Introduction / Morten Tønnessen and Kadri Tüür -- The zoosemiotics of sheep herding with dogs / Louise Westling -- Avian aesthetics: The representation of bird song from music to science / David Rothenberg -- Speaking marmots, deaf hunters: Animal–human semiotic breakdown as the imagined cause of the Manchurian pneumonic plague of 1910–11 / Christos Lynteris -- Entomological rhetoric and the fabrication of the insect world / Adam Dodd -- “Back on the menu”: Humans, insectoid aliens, and the creation of ecophobia in science fiction / Larissa Budde -- Attenborough’s natural history films: The evolutionary epic / Graham Huggan -- Communicating with the cow: Human–animal interaction in written narratives / Taija Kaarlenkaski -- The representation of sheep in modern Japanese literature from Natsume Sōseki to Murakami Haruki / Maki Eguchi -- Animal representation in the Harry Potter series / Sandra Mänty -- Like a fish out of water: Literary representations of fish / Kadri Tüür -- Thought without concepts in Angels and Insects: A.S. Byatt as crypto-biosemiotician / Wendy Wheeler -- A Peircean semiotic model for describing the anti-Oedipal structure of “humanimal” selves / W. John Coletta -- The (proto-)ethical significance of semiosis: When and how does one become somebody who matters? / Ralph R. Acampora -- List of contributors -- Index.