Animal Imagery in George Orwell's novel “Animal Farm”

The present paper is a literary stylistic study that illustrates in George Orwell's novel Animal Farm the imagery, the allegorical meaning, linguistic exploitation or manipulation of words. One of the most traditional features of the Animal Farm and an integral part of its imagery is Orwell 's sophisticated sensitivity to political abuse of language Inwardly, this novel is an allegory that relates to power struggle, usurpation, coercion, manipulation, hypocrisy, oppression, political racket and fear of the ruling classes in any shape they may exist (human or animal). It seems to be a simple tale of animals. However severe the subject is, through his vivid imagery and artful use of literary instruments, Orwell has made it imaginative and humorous. With its clear, deceptively simple, but creatively honed prose style and expressive language, the novel is a source of great aesthetic and intellectual pleasure and political insight.

Connective Tissue: Embracing Fluidity and Subverting Boundaries in European Iron Age and Roman Provincial Images

There is a mounting body of evidence for somatic exchange in burial practices within later British prehistory. The title of the present paper was sparked by a recent article in The Times (Tuesday 1 September 2020), which contained a description of human bone curation and body mingling clearly present in certain Bronze Age funerary depositional rituals. The practice of mixing up bodies has been identified at several broadly coeval sites, a prime example being Cladh Hallan in the Scottish Hebrides, where body parts from different individuals were deliberately mingled, not just somatically but also chronologically. This paper’s arguments rest upon the premise that somatic boundary crossing is reflected in Iron Age and later art, especially in the blending of human and animal imagery and of one animal species with another. Such themes are endemic in La Tène decorative metalwork and in western Roman provincial sacred imagery. It is possible, indeed likely, that such fluidity is associated with deliberate subversion of nature and with the presentation of ‘shamanism’ in its broadest sense. Breaking ‘natural’ rules and orders introduces edge blurring between material and spiritual worlds, representing, perhaps, the ability of certain individuals (shamans) to break free from human-scapes and to wander within the realms of the divine.

A Study of Human and Animal Imagery in the Poems of Ted Hughes

Ted Hughes (1930-1998) began his career as a poet with the publication of The Hawk in the Rain in 1957. He was labelled as “an animal poet”. The cause of disintegration in modern man is his cutting from the elemental nature of his own. Modern man appears to be Yeats’s ‘falcon’ (Yeats, line 2) that goes on decentring himself without cognition and getting absent-minded of the life-force, ‘the elemental power circuit of the universe’. Science and technology lead to reasoning, and reasoning leads to scepticism, and scepticism creeps into human brain (the egg-head) and causes man to question the validity of spirituality and morality. It is this which has been focussed in this article.

‘My kingdom for a horse’: Bestial Sovereignty in Richard III

This chapter offers a conclusion to the book, through a movement away from the human body into the ways that animal bodies are also recruited for Shakespeare’s metaphorics of sovereignty. More than any other of Shakespeare’s history plays, Richard III is dominated by animal imagery. One way to understand this is as a form of moral commentary on the “bestial” state that England has been dragged into by the civil war and, particularly, by the evils of that war as concentrated in Richard himself, a concentration particularly in the image of his body as deformed. However, the slipperiness of metaphor does not allow for the stabilization of sovereignty in any one body, including the stability imagined in the metaphysical conceit of the “kings two bodies”. In this chapter, I offer a final countermand to Kantorowicz’s reading of Richard II wherein Richard’s abdication offers up the Christ-like sacrifice of the king as a concentrated image of divine sovereignty. In place of this, I read Richard III backwards from the moment of Richard’s own brief “abdication” at the end of the play: his willingness to exchange his kingdom for a horse, albeit in the face of death. Whilst not ascribing any revolutionary intent to the character of Richard, this moment affords an alternate insight into the translatable locations of sovereignty. Re-read through its figurations, sovereignty is conceived of as never inalienable; it is, rather, always dependent on the bodies of others including, here, the bodies of animals.

The Roots of Modern Political Satire

This chapter considers the evolution of the political print from 1500 through the mid-seventeenth century. This discussion examines satirical strategies employed by printmakers working at four key historical moments—the Reformation in Germany, the Dutch revolt from Spain, the French wars of religion, and the Commonwealth in England—in order to provide a larger context for the assessment of Romeyn de Hooghe’s innovation of the genre. Two strategies dominate the political prints considered in this chapter: (i) those that employ animal imagery, such as the animal fable and the animal hybrid; and (ii) those that feature individual human protagonists. This chapter introduces three themes that feature prominently throughout the book: (i) the elision of boundaries between man and animal; (ii) the treatment of the satirized body; and (iii) the inter-relationship between text and image. It is shown that the finished, closed, and choreographed body of formal portraiture that dominates earlier political prints gives way in De Hooghe’s satires to the expansive, gaping, and uncontrollable body that has been associated with the genre ever since.

Tłumaczenie tłumaczenia (czyli William Blake w powieści Olgi Tokarczuk)

The paper discusses the connection between Olga Tokarczuk’s novel Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead and the poetry of William Blake. Blake’s ideology was to show how mankind had come to the end because of its misdeeds, using the animal imagery, which links him to the topic presented by Tokarczuk, criticizing the cruelty of the authorities towards animals. She quoted Blake at the beginning of every chapter and created a character skilled in translating Blake. Since not much of Blake’s oeuvre has been translated in Macedonian, the translator of this novel had to deal with translating Blake too. Consequently, this text also focuses on the translation problems which she had to solve.

Breaking the Peace

This chapter examines Woolf’s feminist, pacifist, and anti-fascist engagement with Darwin’s work on dictators through the trope of the worm, suggesting how we might we read both Woolf and Darwin through the lens of animal studies. McCracken reads Woolf’s ‘creature Dictator’ and related worm imagery back through Charles Darwin’s writings both on worms and on nineteenth-century Argentinian Dictator General Juan Manuel de Rosas, whom he met during his voyage on the HMS Beagle. According to Darwin, Rosas led a ‘war of extermination’ against indigenous peoples, yet ‘disapproved of peace having been broken’. This chapter argues that Woolf re-appropriates the Social Darwinist rhetoric of the 1930s, and twists animal imagery to feminist advantage. The chapter also analyses Woolf’s silkworm and related mulberry tree imagery in Three Guineas through Darwin’s interest in breeding silkworms. Placing this imagery in the context of 1930s social Darwinist silk production discourse under the Third Reich, McCracken, argues that, contrary to critics who read her silkworm as symbolic of female creativity, Woolf’s writing intimately connects Darwinian silkworm breeding imagery and fascist politics.