Sign up today...
for featured titles, special offers, bestsellers, and more, in your inbox!
Close
Sign up today...
for featured titles, special offers, bestsellers, and more, in your inbox!
Distribution Programs
Sales Channels
Marketing Services
Digital Services
Specific Services for Publishers
Operations
SOCIAL SCIENCE
336 Pages, 6 x 9
Formats: EPUB, PDF, Mobipocket
PDF, $31.99 (US $31.99) (CA $31.99)
Publication Date: March 2014
ISBN 9781775584988
Rights: WOR
Auckland University Press (Mar 2014)
Touching on indigenous Maori relationships with the now-extinct, flightless moa; the attitudes of Pakeha, or European, settlers toward sheep; the iconography of whales and dolphins; the problems of pest-control; and the pleasures of pet-keeping, this modern-day bestiary is a fascinating study of human–animal relations. In the book’s four parts, the authors unravel the contradictory ways New Zealanders nurture and eradicate, glorify and demonize, cherish and devour, and describe and imagine animals. The study brings together insights from New Zealand’s arts and literature, popular culture, historiography, media, and everyday life to describe and analyze their interactions with nga kararehe and nga manu, the beasts and birds of the land. In doing so, it illuminates fundamental aspects of New Zealand society: how New Zealanders understand their own identities and those of others; how they regard, inhabit, and make use of the natural world; and how they think about what they buy, eat, wear, watch, and read. Rich, multifaceted, and engaging, A New Zealand Book of Beasts satisfyingly explores how culture both shapes and is shaped by the “beasts” of Aotearoa.
Annie Potts is an associate professor in the school of humanities at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand and the codirector, with Philip Armstrong, of the New Zealand Centre for Human-Animal Studies. She is a member of a number of animal welfare and animal research groups and serves on the editorial board of several journals that focus on animal studies. She is currently working on a project titled “Animal Earthquake Stories,” which involves an illustrated account of the fate of Christchurch’s animals after earthquakes. She is the author of Chicken. Philip Armstrong is an associate professor in the school of humanities at the University of Canterbury and the codirector of the New Zealand Centre for Human-Animal Studies. He is the author of What Animals Mean in the Fiction of Modernity and the coeditor of the collection of essays Knowing Animals. Deidre Brown is a senior lecturer in the school of architecture and planning at the University of Auckland and a member of the New Zealand Centre for Human-Animal Studies. They are all members of the Marsden-funded project “Kararehe: Animals in Art, Literature, and Everyday Culture in Aotearoa New Zealand.”
