About this item
From Aesop's Fables to Mockingjay, animals have always played a pivotal role in human culture. Even today, animals wield symbolic powers as varied as the cultures that embrace them. Sacred cows, wily serpents, fearsome lions, elegant swans, busy bees, and sly foxes--all are caricatures of the creatures themselves, yet they reflect not only how different cultures see the natural world around them but also how such cultures make use of their native animals.In this fun and thought-provoking book, historian and animal enthusiast Boria Sax argues for a classification of animals that goes beyond the biological to encompass a more meaningful distinction: tradition. From ants and elephants to tigers and tortoises, The Mythical Zoo weaves together a crosscultural tapestry encompassing mythology, history, art, science, philosophy, and literature.
About the Author
Who first invented spinning and weaving? The spiders, of course. Who developed techniques of cooperative hunting? The wolves. Who pioneered landscape management? The beavers. Who first perfected techniques of mass production? The bees. Now, is what we usually call "human civilization" a good thing or a bad thing? If it is a good thing, you have to give some credit to the spiders, wolves, beavers, and bees. If, however, human civilization is a bad thing, you can also give the spiders, wolves, beavers, and bees some of the blame.
I first became interested in the literature of animals around the end of the 1980's, not terribly long after I had obtained my PhD in German and intellectual history. I was feeling frustrated in my search for an academic job and even study of literature. By accident, I came across an encyclopedia of animals that had been written in the early nineteenth century. There, without any self-consciousness, was a new world of romance and adventure, filled with turkeys that spoke Arabic, beavers that build like architects, and dogs that solve murders. Within a few months, I had junked my previous research and devoted my studies to these texts.
Today, I shudder how nervy the switch was for a destitute young scholar, who, despite one book and several articles, had not managed to obtain any steady job except mopping floors. But soon I had managed to publish two books on animals in literature, The Frog King (1990) and The Parliament of Animals (1992) . Around 1995, I founded Nature in Legend and Story (NILAS, Inc.) , an organization that combines storytelling and scholarship. It was initially, a sort of rag-tag band of intellectual adventurers who loved literature but could not find a niche in the scholarly world. We put together a few conferences, which generated a lot of excitement among the few who attended, but little notice in academia or in what they sometimes call "the real world."
From fables and anecdotes, I moved to mythology, and published The Serpent and the Swan (1997) , a study of animal bride tales from around the world. This was followed by many further publications including an examination of the darker side of animal studies, Animals in the Third Reich (2000) , and a sort of compendium, The Mythical Zoo (2002) , and a cultural history of corvids entitled Crow (2003) . My most recent book is City of Ravens: London, its Tower and its Famous Ravens (2011) , and Imaginary Animals: The Monstrous, the Wondrous and the Human (2013) , probably my best book, published soon by Reaktion Books in London. My book on the cultural history of lizards will be out soon, and I am now working on a book about dinosaurs.
When I embarked on the study of animals in myth and literature, even graduate students did not have to mention a few dozen books just to show that they had read them. In barely more than a couple decades, the literature on human-animal relat
