Representing Animals explores the complex and often surprising connections between our imagining of animals and our cultural environment. The contributors--historians, literary critics, anthropologists, artists, art historians, and scholars of cultural studies--examine the ways we talk, write, photograph, imagine, and otherwise represent animals. The book includes topics such as pet cloning, fox hunting, animatronic characters, and how we displace our fear of aging onto our dogs.

Representing Animals demonstrates the deep connections between the way we think about animals and the...

To modern sensibilities, nineteenth-century zoos often seem to be unnatural places where animals led miserable lives in cramped, wrought-iron cages. Today zoo animals, in at least the better zoos, wander in open spaces that resemble natural habitats and are enclosed, not by bars, but by moats, cliffs, and other landscape features. In Savages and Beasts, Nigel Rothfels traces the origins of the modern zoo to the efforts of the German animal entrepreneur Carl Hagenbeck.

By the late nineteenth century, Hagenbeck had emerged as the world's undisputed leader in the capture and...