Animal History in the Modern City: Exploring Liminality

Description:

This book is open access and available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. It is funded by Knowledge Unlatched.
Animals are increasingly recognized as fit and proper subjects for historians, yet their place in conventional historical narratives remains contested. This volume argues for a history of animals based on the centrality of liminality - the state of being on the threshold, not quite one thing yet not quite another. Since animals stand between nature and culture, wildness and domestication, the countryside and the city, and tradition and modernity, the concept of liminality has a special resonance for historical animal studies.

Assembling an impressive cast of contributors, this volume employs liminality as a lens through which to study the social and cultural history of animals in the modern city. It includes a variety of case studies, such as the horse-human relationship in the towns of New Spain, hunting practices in 17th-century France, the birth of the zoo in Germany and the role of the stray dog in the Victorian city, demonstrating the interrelated nature of animal and human histories.

Animal History in the Modern City is a vital resource for scholars and students interested in animal studies, urban history and historical geography.

Brief description: Clemens Wischermann is Chair of Economic and Social History at the University of Constance, Germany. He has published widely on the history of industrialization and urbanization in 19th and 20th-century Europe. He is the author of Advertising and the European City: Historical Perspectives (2000).

Review Quotes:

"A smart, innovative, and inspiring intervention into the increasingly-crucial field of Human-Animal Studies from an impressive group of researchers. Readers will find many fascinating stories that expose the grey areas between imagined categories (e.g. feral, wild, pest) that people have used (often unsuccessfully) to constrain animals." --Susan Nance, Professor of History, University of Guelph, Canada

"This innovative volume expertly places animal studies in conversation with urban history and the interdisciplinary concept of liminality. Blending theory and empirical case studies in surprising and fascinating ways, the volume maps out new directions in animal and urban studies." --Chris Pearson, Senior Lecturer in Twentieth-Century History, University of Liverpool, UK