Animal Biographies: Toward a History of Individuals

Éric Baratay's Animal Biographies offers innovative accounts of animals' lives, challenging the readers' thinking about animals and highlighting the need to develop a nonanthropocentric means of viewing their lives. It uses firsthand accounts from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to reconstruct the stories of famous animals, such as Modestine, Warrior, and Islero, revealing their histories, personalities, and shared experiences.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 277 pages
Publication date: 30 August 2022
Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Éric Baratay, a pioneering researcher in animal histories in France, applies his knowledge of historical methodologies to give voice to some of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries most interesting animals. He offers brief yet innovative accounts of these animals' lives in a way that challenges the readers thinking about animals. Baratay illustrates the need to develop a nonanthropocentric means of viewing the lives of animals and including animals themselves in the narrative of their lives. Animal Biographies launches an all-new investigation into the lives of animals and is a major contribution to the field of animal studies. This English translation of Éric Baratay's Biographies animales: Des Vies retrouvées, originally published in France in 2017 (Éditions du Seuil), uses firsthand accounts starting from the nineteenth century about specific animals who lived in Europe and the United States to reconstruct, as best as possible, their stories as they would have experienced them. History is, after all, not just the domain of humans. Animals have their own. Baratay breaks the model of human exceptionalism to give us the biographies of some of history and literature's most famous animals. The reader will catch a glimpse of storied lives as told by Modestine, the donkey who carried Robert Louis Stevenson through the Alps; Warrior, the World War I horse made famous in Steven Spielberg's War Horse; Islero, the bull who gored Spain's greatest bullfighter; and others. Through these stories, we discover their histories, their personalities, and their shared experiences with others of their species.

Dimension: 229 x 152 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780820362182