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Author Wylie, Dan, author

Title Death and compassion : the elephant in Southern African literature / Dan Wylie
Published Johannesburg : Wits University Press, 2018
©2018

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Description 1 online resource (ix, 267 pages)
Contents No simple sort of mirror: compassion and the precolonial -- Experiments and devastation: early travelogues and the advent of zoology -- A most delightful mania: hunters' tales and evasions -- Not very good at remorse: elephants in fiction -- A tear rolled down her face: teen fiction and elephant mind -- Bosses of the Bushveld: game-ranger memoirs -- Repeatedly folded frontier: the 'field-research memoir' -- The cult of the remnant: the elephants of Knysna and Addo -- The elephant is unhappy: poetry as compassion
Summary "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 fifteen minutes. This 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, and 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, aboutwho 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"--Back cover
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (pages 247-258) and index
Notes Print version record
Subject Englisch, ...
Southern African literature (English) -- History and criticism
Elephants in literature.
Wildlife conservation -- Africa, Southern
Southern Africa.
elephants.
literature.
prose.
literary criticism.
LITERARY CRITICISM -- General.
Wildlife conservation
Elephants in literature
Southern African literature (English)
Literatur
Elefanten Motiv
Artenschutz Motiv
Southern Africa
Südafrika
Genre/Form Electronic books
Criticism, interpretation, etc.
Form Electronic book
ISBN 9781776142194
1776142195