Main description:

While historiography is dominated by attempts that try to standardize and de-individualize the behavior of animals, history proves to be littered with records of the exceptional lives of unusual animals. This book introduces animal biography as an approach to the re-framing of animals as both objects of knowledge as well as subjects of individual lives. Taking an interdisciplinary perspective and bringing together scholars from, among others, literary, historical and cultural studies, the texts collected in this volume seek to refine animal biography as a research method and framework to studying, capturing, representing and acknowledging animal others as individuals. From Heini Hediger's biting monitor, Hachiko and Murr to celluloid ape Caesar and the mourning of Topsy's gruesome death, the authors discuss how animal biographies are discovered and explored through connections with humans that can be traced in archives, ethological fieldwork and novels, and probe the means of constructing animal biographies from taxidermy to film, literature and social media. Thus, they invite deeper conversations with socio-political and cultural contexts that allow animal biographies to provide narratives that reach beyond individual life stories, while experimenting with particular forms of animal biographies that might trigger animal activism and concerns for animal well-being, spur historical interest and enrich the literary imagination.

Contents:

1. Introduction: Biographies, Animals and Individuality

Andre Krebber and Mieke Roscher

Explorations

2. Living, Biting Monitors, a Morose Howler, and Other Infamous Animals: Animal Biographies in Ethology and Zoo Biology

Matthew Chrulew

3. Finding a Man and his Horse in the Archive?

Hilda Kean

4. Recovering and Reconstructing Animal Selves in Literary Autozoographies

Frederike Middelhoff

Reflections

5. A Dog's Life: The Challenges and Promise of Animal Biography

Aaron Skabelund

6. "We Know Them All" - Does it Make Sense to Create a Collective Biography of the European Bison?

Markus Krzoska

7. Animal Life Stories; Or, the Making of Animal Subjects in Primatological Narratives of Fieldwork

Mira Shah

Constructions

8. Taxidermy's Literary Biographies

Susan McHugh

9. Caesar - The Rise and Dawn of a Humanimalistic Identity

Daniel Wolf

10. Postscript, Posthuman: Werner Herzog's "Crocodile" at the End of the World

Dominic O'Key

Experiments

11. The Elephant's I: Looking for Abu'l Abbas

Radhika Subramaniam

12. Topsy: The Elephant We Must Never Forget

Kim Stallwood

13. Online Animal (Auto-)Biographies: What Does it Mean When We "Give Animals a Voice"?

Margo DeMello