1st Edition
Wild Animal Skins in Victorian Britain Zoos, Collections, Portraits, and Maps
By Ann C. Colley
Copyright 2014
218 Pages
by
Routledge
218 Pages
by
Routledge
218 Pages
by
Routledge
Also available as eBook on:
What did the 13th Earl of Derby, his twenty-two-year-old niece, Manchester’s Belle Vue Zoo, and even some ordinary laborers all have in common? All were avid collectors and exhibitors of exotic, and frequently unruly, specimens. In her study of Britain’s craze for natural history collecting, Ann C. Colley makes extensive use of archival materials to examine the challenges, preoccupations, and... Read more
Introduction; Chapter 1 Preamble Theorizing about Skin; Chapter 1a Industry, Empire, Portraiture, and Skin at the Belle Vue Zoo, Manchester; Chapter 2 A Skin Disorder; Chapter 3 Stuff and Nonsense: Skin and Victorian Animal Portraiture; Chapter 4 Touch: Reaching through the Bars; Chapter 5 Wild Skins and Mapping the Victorian Landscape;
Biography
Ann C. Colley is a SUNY Distinguished Professor at the State University College of New York at Buffalo. She has published numerous articles and books, including Victorians in the Mountains, Robert Louis Stevenson and the Colonial Imagination, Nostalgia and Recollection in Victorian Culture, The Search for Synthesis in Literature and Art: The Paradox of Space, Edward Lear and the Critics, and Tennyson and Madness.
’Ann Colley’s magisterial Wild Animal Skins in Victorian Britain brilliantly explores the Victorians’ fascination with wild skins. Reading this book, we are changed not only by its wide-ranging erudition, but by its moral vision. Like Edward Lear - who, Colley argues, in both his nonsense verses and his natural history illustrations offered a glimpse of a creature’s subjectivity - we may find that nonhuman animal minds make us feel uneasy in our own skins.’ Deborah Denenholz Morse, The College of William and Mary, USA, co-editor of Victorian Animal Dreams
