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Taking its cue from medieval bestiaries, this alphabet book is composed of 63 entries ranging from ADDER to WOLFHOUNDS, with each entry juxtaposing an image, an excerpt from a story by Alice Munro, and a commentary. The images are reproduced from original medieval illuminations, the excerpts feature an animal, or a human being depicted through animal comparison, and the commentaries highlight the way Munro suggests relationality between the human and the non-human.Munro troubles the boundaries between good and evil as she troubles the boundaries between human and non-human. Through the mask of the animal, she effects a release from strict morality and proposes an uncommon and undomesticated representation of human life, revolving on simultaneous transcendence and derision. The volume will appeal to Munro scholars and to lovers of Alice Munro alike because it solves some of the enigmas set by her stories but suggests other riddles and more secrets.

The Modernist Bestiary centres on Le Bestiaire ou Cortège d'Orphée (1911), a multimedia collaborative work by French-Polish poet Guillaume Apollinaire and French artist Raoul Dufy, and its homonym, The Bestiary or Procession of Orpheus (1979), by British artist Graham Sutherland. Rather than reconstructing the lineage of these two compositions, the book uncovers the aesthetic and intellectual processes involved that operate in different times, places and media. The Apollinaire and Dufy Bestiary is an open-ended collaboration, a feature that Sutherland develops in his re-visiting, and this book shows how these neglected works are caught up in many-faceted networks of traditions and genres. These include Orphic poetry from the past, contemporary musical settings, and bestiary writing from its origins to the present. The nature of productive dialogue between thought and art, and the refracted light they throw on each other are explored in each of the pieces in the book, and the aesthetic experience emerges as generative rather than reductive or complacent.The contributors'encounters with these works take the form of poetry and essays, all moving freely between different disciplines and practices, humanistic and posthumanist critical dimensions, as well as different animals and art forms. They draw on disciplines ranging from music, art history, translation, Classical poetry and French poetry, and are nurtured by approaches including phenomenology, cultural studies, sound studies, and critical animal studies. Collectively the book shows that the aesthetic encounter, by nature affective, is by nature also interdisciplinary and motivating, and that it spurs the critical in addressing the complex issues of'humananimality'.Praise for The Modernist Bestiary'Enacting in multiple compelling ways the mobility and relationality at the heart of its concerns, this collection makes a major contribution to the various fields into which it intervenes, including modernist studies, translation studies, critical animal studies, and research into intermedial transmission, especially between text and image and text and music.'- Martin Crowley, University of Cambridge

Le monde animal fascine les hommes, toutes civilisations confondues, depuis les origines de l'humanité. Cette fascination s'accompagne bien souvent d'une réinterprétation suivant les époques, voire d'une récupération et d'une instrumentalisation en fonction d'enjeux propres à chaque moment historique.

Just like we do today, people in medieval times struggled with the concept of human exceptionalism and the significance of other creatures. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the medieval bestiary. Sarah Kay's exploration of French and Latin bestiaries offers fresh insight into how this prominent genre challenged the boundary between its human readers and other animals. Bestiaries present accounts of animals whose fantastic behaviors should be imitated or avoided, depending on the given trait. In a highly original argument, Kay suggests that the association of beasts with books is here both literal and material, as nearly all surviving bestiaries are copied on parchment made of animal skin, which also resembles human skin. Using a rich array of examples, she shows how the content and materiality of bestiaries are linked due to the continual references in the texts to the skins of other animals, as well as the ways in which the pages themselves repeatedly—and at times, it would seem, deliberately—intervene in the reading process. A vital contribution to animal studies and medieval manuscript studies, this book sheds new light on the European bestiary and its profound power to shape readers'own identities.

Le premier trait qui distingue la représentation animalière des représentations végétales ou humaines est son ancienneté et la précocité surprenante de son apparition. Le répertoire de l'art préhistorique est en effet tout entier constitué d'animaux.

This book studies the phenomena of monsters and marvels from the time of Pliny the Elder through the 14th century.

Voici un livre bien original sur la littérature africaine. (...) En fouillant un peu, que peut-on bien trouver au fond d'un écrivain africain? D'abord et avant tout, des bestioles! Des idées de bestioles! Des rêves de bestioles! Des hantises de bestioles! (...) Rien d'étonnant à cela! L'Afrique, c'est connu, ne constitue pas simplement la meilleure réserve animalière du monde. L'animal est aussi une métaphore essentielle de son expression culturelle. En se limitant au seul bestiaire, on peut sans aucune difficulté tracer la carte littéraire de la Guinée avec ses différentes zones d'enracinement, ses sources d'inspiration, ses confluences thématiques et les méandres de ses différents styles et de ses différentes formes.

Revision of the author's thesis (Ph. D.)--Oxford Brookes University.

The medieval bestiary was a contribution to didactic religious literature, addressing concerns central to all walks of Christian and secular life. These essays analyze the bestiary from both literary and art historical perspectives, exploring issues including kinship, romance, sex, death, and the afterlife.