Reading Cats and Dogs

Reviews / Votes

Within a mile of my home I encounter animals along a wide spectrum of constraint and freedom, ranging from pampered hyperdomestication to lethal neglect. This fascinating collection of chapters extends that variety to the international, exploring animal-centered works of literature out of Beijing and Brussels, Soweto and Sri Lanka, Cameroon and Brazil. Spilling over into the philosophical and affectingly autobiographical, the contributors collectively challenge and valorize anew our views of animal companionship. Above all they emphasize that, enveloped by cross-cultural globalization, mass species extinction and slaughter, zoonotic pandemic and climate change, human and non-human animals' fates are irrevocably entwined. -- Dan Wylie, author of Elephant This fascinating and important collection enlivens the scope of ecocritical thinking by bringing together perspectives on how literature, film, and philosophy deepen the human-animal relationship. This book complicates what we think about when we think about companion animals. It disrupts what we consider domesticated versus feral. The international scope breaks open new avenues of reflection and feeling. A Cameroonian novelist writes of a man who forms a transformative companion relationship with a buffalo. Stray cats in China, Brazil, and Turkey reveal cultural histories that shape the human-animal bond. Michael Ondaatje's beloved memoir Running in the Family is seen anew as a family story limned by the presence of animals. An understanding of South African apartheid broadens from race and class to species. University students in Wuhan, China, deploy social media in their care of feral cats. A French philosopher writes with profound lyricism of sharing thought with her dogs. Many pleasures await the readers of this brilliant collection. -- Alison Hawthorne Deming, author of Zoologies: On Animals and the Human Spirit Reading Cats and Dogs: Companion Animals in World Literature surveys a fascinating array of companion animals from a wide range of cultures and national literatures. The contributors explore dynamic and often moving relationships between humans and various companion species, primarily through literary texts but also through the personal experiences of the authors and editors. The volume's diversity is one of its strengths, inviting writers who might be familiar with Donna Haraway's dog or Jacques Derrida's cat to consider other cats and dogs as they are represented in literature from around the world, from countries and contexts as diverse as Sri Lanka, China, Italy, Japan, Cameroon, South Africa, Europe, and the US, including important indigenous voices. -- Michael Lundblad, University of Oslo; editor of Animalities: Literary and Cultural Studies Beyond the Human