Article ID: CBB459434748

Mourning Humans and Other Animals through Fictional Taxidermy Collections (2019)

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Lydia Millet’s Magnificence (2012) and Henrietta Rose-Innes’s The Green Lion (2015) stage various repurposings of taxidermy collections as acts of mourning that loft fragile alternatives to the melancholia, narcissism, and depression that haunt histories of mass killings. Set at the turn of the twenty-first century, a period marked by what affect theorist Lauren Berlant terms “cruel optimism,” or a perverse desire for the obstacles to flourishing, these novels frame larger questions concerning to what vital effects uses of lifeless bodies frustrate recovery efforts in our time. Telling stories not of single objects of taxidermy but rather of what accrues along with their collections, these novels explore why this particular form of representation proves ripe for decolonizing affective politics at the intersections of genocides, extinctions, and related horrors.

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Authors & Contributors
Jylkka, Katja
Bezan, Sarah
Anne Milne
Phillips, Philip E.
Shaw, Lytle
Nicoletta Brazzelli
Concepts
Science and literature
Literary analysis
Sculpture
Taxidermy
Science and art
Poetry and poetics
Time Periods
21st century
19th century
20th century, late
Medieval
20th century
18th century
Places
Galapagos Islands
United States
Europe
Australia
Ireland
Great Britain
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