The fast-growing field of Animal Studies is a varied and much contested domain. Engagement with animals has encouraged both collaboration and conflict between researchers within the arts, humanities, and social sciences. Animal Encounters comprises a series of meetings not only between diverse beasts, but also between distinct disciplinary methods, theoretical approaches, and ethical positions. The essays here collected come together from literary and cultural studies, sociology and anthropology, ecocriticism and art history, philosophy and feminism, science and technology studies, history...

This feminist-materialist study contributes towards a critique of the modern nuclear family in Western Europe by looking back at its cultural constructions and negotiations in early modern England. Connecting the traces of the past to the politics of today, the book offers further bricks to the building of a cultural history of the meanings and practices of family life in their continuity as well as discontinuity. The family is here defined as a discursive field that provides the framework for the analysis of the following interrelated concepts and categories, each being itself constituted by...