Death and Compassion : The Elephant in Southern African Literature

• Record Nr.: UNINA9911008414503321
• Autore: Wylie Dan
• Pubbl/distr/stampa: Johannesburg : , : Wits University Press, , 2018; ©2018
• ISBN: 9781776142200; 1776142209
• Edizione: [1st ed.]
• Descrizione fisica: 1 online resource (280 p.)
• Disciplina: 820.9968
• Soggetti: Elephants in literature; Southern African literature (English); Wildlife conservation in literature
• Lingua di pubblicazione: Inglese
• Formato: Materiale a stampa
• Livello bibliografico: Monografia
• Nota di contenuto: Front Cover -- Title -- Copyright -- Contents -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction: Compassion for elephants? -- 1. No Simple Sort of Mirror: Compassion and the precolonial -- 2. Experiments and Devastation: Early travelogues and the advent of zoology -- 3. A Most Delightful Mania: Hunters' tales and evasions -- 4. Not Very Good at Remorse: Elephants in fiction -- 5. A Tear Rolled down Her Face: Teen fiction and elephant mind -- 6. Bosses of the Bushveld: Game-ranger memoirs -- 7. Repeatedly Folded Frontier: The 'field-research memoir' -- 8. The Cult of the Remnant: The elephants of Knysna and Addo -- 9. The Elephant Is Unhappy: Poetry as compassion -- Afterword -- Notes -- Select Bibliography -- Index -- Back Cover.
• Sommario/riassunto: Elephants are in dire straits - again. They were virtually extirpated from much of Africa by European hunters in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but their numbers resurged for a while in the heyday of late-colonial conservation efforts in the twentieth. Now, according to one estimate, an elephant is being killed every 15 minutes. This is at the same time that the reasons for being especially compassionate and protective towards elephants are now so well-known that they have become almost a cliché: their high intelligence, rich emotional lives including a capacity for mourning, caring matriarchal societal ; structures, that strangely charismatic grace. Saving elephants is one of the iconic conservation struggles of our time. As a society we must aspire to understand how and why people develop compassion - or fail to do so - and what stories we tell ourselves about animals that reveal the relationship between ourselves and animals. This book is the first study to probe the primary features, and possible effects, of some major literary genres as they pertain to elephants south of the Zambezi over three centuries: indigenous forms, early European travelogues, hunting accounts, novels, game ranger memoirs, scientists' accounts, and poems. It examines what these literatures imply about the various and diverse attitudes towards elephants, about who shows compassion towards them, in what ways and why. It is the story of a developing contestation between death and compassion, between those who kill and those who love and protect.