Animal Imagery Research Articles

The Environmental Function of Animal Characters Across Different Literary Genres

This article explores the remarkable versatility of animal images and characters through their function in literature. The representation of animals in literature has emerged as one of the powerful tools for promoting environmental awareness and advocacy. Across diverse literary genres, the use of animal imagery and characters serves a multitude of functions in catalyzing ecological consciousness. In lyrical nature writing, vivid descriptions of animals and their habitats evoke emotional resonance, inviting readers to appreciate the fragility and resilience of ecosystems. Allegorical narratives, meanwhile, employ animal protagonists to challenge societal norms and expose environmental injustices through metaphorical storytelling. Even in children's literature, charming portrayals of animal characters serve as accessible gateways for young readers to the natural world.

Structural Contrast in William Blake’s “The Tyger” and “The Lamb”

Structuralism is a theory focusing on analyzing the structure of a text and the relationship between the elements in order to get the meaning of literary works. Binary opposition is an important concept of structuralism, it is a concept or idea that can gain meaning through its relationship with its opposite. William Blake’s “The Tyger” and the “The Lamb” are two poems contain a lot of meaning that opposites each other. This study address several aspects related to the binary opposition of structuralism in the poems “The Tyger” and “The Lamb” by William Blake: (1) The structural elements in the poems “The Tyger” and “The Lamb” by William Blake. (2) The way “The Tyger” and “The Lamb” by William Blake employ binary oppositions in their structure to convey contrasting themes. (3) The influence of binary opposition on the overall meaning and interpretation of “The Tyger” and “The Lamb” by William Blake. (4) The benefits of using structuralism in poetry for language teaching, and how these can be addressed in teacher training programs. This study applied a qualitative method and context-oriented approach. This study shows that by utilizing structural elements, thematic explorations, tone, language style, and binary oppositions, Blake develops two mutually enhancing yet opposing perspectives on creation and divine existence. The strong and frightening Tyger is in stark contrast with the meek and pure Lamb, representing the intricate nature of life and the various facets of spirituality. This resistance goes beyond just the use of animal imagery, affecting the themes, tone, and language in every poem. Blake prompts readers to confront the contradictions of existence by juxtaposing light with darkness, innocence with experience, and nature with divinity. Studying poetry can be difficult because of different levels of literary skill, teaching methods, and tools, but it provides many academic benefits. Poetry nurtures a greater love for literature, improves creative skills and critical thinking, and aids.

Aerial Wildlife Image Repository for animal monitoring with drones in the age of artificial intelligence.

Drones (unoccupied aircraft systems) have become effective tools for wildlife monitoring and conservation. Automated animal detection and classification using artificial intelligence (AI) can substantially reduce logistical and financial costs and improve drone surveys. However, the lack of annotated animal imagery for training AI is a critical bottleneck in achieving accurate performance of AI algorithms compared to other fields. To bridge this gap for drone imagery and help advance and standardize automated animal classification, we have created the Aerial Wildlife Image Repository (AWIR), which is a dynamic, interactive database with annotated images captured from drone platforms using visible and thermal cameras. The AWIR provides the first open-access repository for users to upload, annotate, and curate images of animals acquired from drones. The AWIR also provides annotated imagery and benchmark datasets that users can download to train AI algorithms to automatically detect and classify animals, and compare algorithm performance. The AWIR contains 6587 animal objects in 1325 visible and thermal drone images of predominantly large birds and mammals of 13 species in open areas of North America. As contributors increase the taxonomic and geographic diversity of available images, the AWIR will open future avenues for AI research to improve animal surveys using drones for conservation applications. Database URL: https://projectportal.gri.msstate.edu/awir/.

Ominous Creatures: Foreshadowing and Intertextuality in Joseph Conrad’s Shorter Fiction

In a number of short stories and novellas during one period of his writing Joseph Conrad specifically used apparently unrelated but dramatic animal imagery, detached from but foreshadowing the development of the subsequent events in each narrative. There may be a number of reasons for this type of foreshadowing and for its effect in his shorter fiction which are explored. Intertextuality has been noted between the stories of Joseph Conrad and H. G. Wells. Here additional examples are found between the works of these authors, men who were good friends but later had conflicting views about writing and life, and between their own and other authors’ works.

Burial of two closely related infants under a “dragon stone” from prehistoric Armenia

“Dragon stones” are prehistoric basalt stelae carved with animal imagery found in Armenia and surrounding regions. These monuments have a complex history of use and reuse across millennia, and the original date of creation is still a matter of debate. In this article, we present a unique dragon stone context excavated at the site of Lchashen, Armenia, where a three-and-a-half-meter high basalt stela with an image of a sacrificed bovid was found above a burial dating to the 16th century BC. The burial stands out among hundreds from this site as the only one in connection with a “dragon stone”, and one of very few containing the remains of newborn babies. Furthermore, our analyses of ancient DNA extracted from the well-preserved skeletal remains of two 0–2-month-old individuals showed them to be second-degree related females with identical mitochondrial sequences of the haplogroup U5a1a1 lineage, thus indicating that the infants are closely related. Additionally, we assessed that the buried individuals displayed genetic ancestry profiles similar to other Bronze Age individuals from the region.

We, the Animals: Studying Interspecies Relationships in Never Cry Wolf and Mia and the White Lion

Cinema has undergone multiple shifts in recent times and one of the major shifts is towards the eco cinema, where ecocritical theories, primarily focusing on interspecies relationships are highlighted. These theories also include the basic rights of animals, human’s relationship with animals and nature, and also reject anthropocentric beliefs. In one of his articles titled, “The Human Animal: An Ecocritical View of Animal Imagery in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World”, Erik Fredriksson argues that, “Ecocriticism begins to see human and non-human nature as interconnected and part of a whole. The distinction between human and animal is questioned and animal stories are examined to illuminate how we think about animals. The idea is also to promote empathy towards animals by highlighting kinship and to break up patterns of anthropocentric thinking.” In this paper, the focus will be on two films based on real-life events, Never Cry Wolf, based on Farley Mowat’s book, and Mia and the White Lion, which talks about the fate of lions in the hands of the canned hunters in South Africa, which will blur the line between reel and real. This paper will also highlight the interspecies interactions and relationships, more specifically, the unconventional interaction between the supposed ‘dangerous and ferocious’ wolves and lions and the two central characters, Tyler and Mia.

Reading history through animal imagery from pre–WWII British editorial cartoons: Gandhi’s anticolonial struggle during India’s civil disobedience movement (1930–1931)

ABSTRACT This article studies animal imagery published in pre-WWII British editorial cartoons offering constant updates about India’s Civil Disobedience movement (1930s) against British colonialism to uncover the processes through which the event and the people participating in it, both Indian political leaders and British administrators, were designated a particular animal symbol that popularly became associated with their identities in the long run. In other words, the article looks into the question of how animal images affect the iconography of historical personalities. The article will be an insight into defamiliarizing/deconstructing the events and people from this movement and then analyse how animals were used as substitutes for defining, explaining, and debating a concept, a human, an event, or a nationality in the cartoons published in British newspapers in those times. Consequently, I will explore satirical representations of everyday politics during the Civil Disobedience movement, thus offering the cultural history of the Raj in those times. As these editorial cartoons are published almost at the same time as the actual occurrence of events in the 1930s, they also give an insight into the prevalent colonial stereotypes, traditions, beliefs, humour, tolerance level, as well as ‘domestic politics, social themes,’ of the existing society (Kemnitz).

Animals and Emotions in Medieval German Literature: The Various Functions of Bestial Imagery in the Staging of Emotions

This article, which continues ideas developed in the context of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft: Graduiertenkolleg 1876—215342465 (GRK1876), examines how animals are used in medieval texts to (re)present, shape, and develop the literary representation of emotions. On the basis of selected examples, it shows how diverse the literary functions of animal imagery can be and how many different poetic and aesthetic strategies can be found for staging animals, connecting them with human characters and the recipientsof the tale. In this way, animals can serve as objects of cultural self-reflection and as models for philosophical orientation. bySandra HofertFriedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nurembergsandra.hofert@fau.de

Writing Birds, Butterflies, and Other Insects: Metaphors of Mortality and Metamorphosis in Eighteenth-Century Religious Literature

ABSTRACT The mortality of man and the possibility of life after death are recurring themes in eighteenth-century German and Swiss literature. Animal imagery serves as an idiosyncratic poetic device for illustrating the inevitability and finality of death or the metamorphosis of the body in preparation for eternity. This article explores the functions of animal metaphors of mortality and metamorphosis in three eighteenth-century works of religious literature. Gessner’s epic poem Der Tod Abels (1758) describes how the discovery of a dead bird prompts Eve to reflect on her responsibility for human mortality. Klopstock’s hymnic poem ‘Die Frühlingsfeyer’ (1759) questions the impermanence of life by example of a little insect, the ‘Frühlingswürmchen’. In Lavater’s play Abraham und Isaak (1776), the metamorphosis of a caterpillar into a butterfly proves that death is the threshold to eternity. The article offers a new perspective on the German-language tradition of Christian poetry and Bibeldichtung across literary genres and the role of animal imagery in it.

Zoomorphic imagery and social process during the Early Bronze Age

Through the agency of animals, we think about our identity, landscape and society, and therefore animal imagery holds a special place in approaches to human thought. Through a study of the zoomorphic figurine assemblage recorded at the Early Bronze Age site of Koçumbeli-Ankara, we argue that the zoomorphic figurines of this time period were produced through a meaningful linking of particular images and raw materials to particular use contexts. For example, the ambiguously sexed zoomorphic figurines of clay are usually found within the settlement contexts, whereas the rest of the zoomorphic imagery, in the form of elaborately decorated and often male-sexed metal statues and standards, are found in ‘elite’ burials located in cemeteries. This occurs on the background of an emergent form of ritual control, which was negotiated through the separation of cemetery and settlement. In these contexts, the authority of the past was invoked via ancestral imagery through the careful employment of new raw materials, such as metals, that equally became agential in the separation of age, gender and class-based differences within society, at the eve of the centralization process in Anatolia.

COGNITIVE APPRAOCH TO ANIMAL IMAGERY VIA AUTOINTERTEXTUALITY (BASED ON IRWIN SHAW’S WRITING STYLE)

The current article deals with the analysis of animal imagery in the novels by Irwin Shaw, putting forward the Conceptual Blending Theory (CBT) based on G. Fauconnier and M. Turner’s theory of cognition. Incorporation of animal imagery in the novels in question provides a clue into the author’s aforethought symbolism, revealing the writer’s worldview and individual style. The subject matter of the article is the in-depth analysis of animal imagery employed by I. Shaw based on a conceptual blending mechanism and the survey of autointertextuality as a tool aimed to establish cohesive ties within the writing of the author. The topicality is determined by the ongoing tendency of cognitive linguistics to detect conceptual blending and autointertextuality as mechanisms that are interwoven in creative processes engendering new ideas and meanings as well as reflecting the dynamics of the main concepts in the author’s world picture. Figurative usage of animal imagery challenges the reader to decode covert meanings as well as gain insight into characters’ actions, motives, and perspectives. Moreover, Irwin Shaw exploits emotional affiliation with the natural world to evoke emotional empathy in readers.

Goliath’s Humanimal Body: Masculinity, Ethnicity, and Animal Imagery in 1 Samuel 17

Abstract In 1 Samuel 17, Goliath is described using animal imagery, depicted like a sea creature, a lion and bear, a dog, and scavengers’ prey. I argue that these images present Goliath as not fully human, and contribute to the construction of his masculinity and ethnicity. This article traces the following trajectory: masculinity is established then undermined; the foreigner encroaches then is expelled. Goliath is introduced as a hypermasculine ultrapredator. Akin to a sea monster from the chaotic beyond, he has an exoskeleton of fish-scale armour (17:5). David then likens Goliath to lions and bears (17:34–37), imperial symbols for fearsome foreign nations. David, though, can grasp their beards (overturning their masculinity) and slay them. Goliath perceives David to be treating him like a scavenging dog (17:43)—a dishonorable creature encroaching where it does not belong. Consequently, the opponents threaten to give the other’s flesh to the birds and beasts (17:44, 46). Their bodies’ masculine wholeness is disarticulated by scavengers and expelled from society.

Brom Bones Meets the Count de Buffon: Race, Biopower, and Natural History in ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’

ABSTRACT In Washington Irving’s short story ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’, animals are everywhere and almost seem interchangeable with humans. Nevertheless, the story’s pervasive animal imagery has received scant critical attention. In this paper, I consider the blurring human/animal binary in the story as a proxy for blurred lines between different ‘races’ of humans coexisting in Early America. Washington Irving uses his satirical Dutch narrator Dietrich Knickerbocker’s engagement with the Count de Buffon’s Natural History to question categorization based on the interrelated concepts of species and race, which were becoming important in an increasingly biopolitical early United States. I place Irving’s engagement with natural history in context before considering the ‘racial’ tension between the Dutch and the Yankees that Knickerbocker constructs in ‘Sleepy Hollow’. Irving marks this tension as satire in part through Knickerbocker’s deployment of bears and lions, two animal metaphors with special significance in Buffonian natural history. Close attention to the implications of these metaphors complicates our understanding of Brom Bones, a central but understudied character. I also discuss how this satirical use of race could deepen our understanding of ‘Sleepy Hollow’s’ actual racialized characters. Focusing on the animals in ‘Sleepy Hollow’ reveals Irving’s critique of using science to categorize humans into distinct racial groupings for political convenience and complicates our understanding of how early Americans grappled with the interplay between shifting scientific and political paradigms.

China’s metaphorically “othered” image inThe New York Times(1949-2020)

This study investigates, within the framework of Critical Metaphor Analysis, how The New York Times ( NYT) has been metaphorically formulating China as an “other” from 1949 to 2020. Metaphors were identified with reference to Pragglejaz Group’s (2007) Metaphor Identification Procedure. WAR and GAME were detected as dominant concepts, and LIQUID, DISEASE, ANIMAL, MACHINE, and OBSTACLE secondary imagery. It is found that the newspaper’s journalistic values in foreign news reporting and judging criteria toward political leadership have remained radically unchanged. Having been influenced by changes in China-U.S. relations and America’s domestic socio-political ideals, the NYT has been othering China from the civilized world, which tends to be particularly prominent when China’s performance is short of the values and norms preached by the US, and became inconspicuous during China-U.S. alliance. Running counter to its commitment to “truth,” the newspaper employed discursive strategies to balance between America’s moral self-identity and its China policy, and vindicate behaviors identical to those it has been criticizing China for.

The influence of visually dynamic imagery on purchase intentions: The roles of arousal and lay rationalism

The presence of motion is increasingly common in online advertising. Despite the increase in spending on digital advertisements and decades of academic research on dynamic imagery in advertising, our understanding of this phenomenon remains limited. The dynamic default hypothesis posits that animated imagery should generate more arousal than comparable static imagery. However, research on advertisements containing dynamic imagery reveal inconsistencies in their ability to stimulate arousal. A potential explanation for these inconsistent findings lies in the behavioral urgency hypothesis, which postulates that not all motion is weighted equally in terms of its ability to generate arousal. We conduct three experiments to test this proposition. Interestingly, our findings show that imagery appearing to loom closer to consumers stimulates greater levels of arousal than either static or imagery appearing to recede away from consumers. Additionally, our work identifies moderating effects of lay rationalism which can work to strengthen or attenuate these effects. Together, this work provides a more comprehensive explanation for the varied findings in the literature.

A cognitive analysis of animal imagery in digital discourse: a case study of Bengali tweets

Abstract As explored in relevant literature, both ecolinguistics and cognitive linguistics emphasize metaphors as conceptual devices to frame the reality around us. Animal metaphor forms an interesting domain to comprehend human-animal relationship at the interface of ecolinguistics and cognitive linguistics. Deriving from this, the research questions the suitability of the animalized language through Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) and Conceptual Blending Theory (CBT). Data from Twitter has been analyzed to understand how the animals on social media impacts the human mind in establishing speciesism among Bengali speakers. Hence, to supplement the research with an ecological perspective, a mixed-method approach has been employed using three studies: (1) to understand the general public opinion on using animal metaphor; (2) to present the cognitive operations of the imaginative mind in using animal metaphor; and (3) to check the reflection of human attitude in real-time practices. The research findings highlight the harmful frames that social media can trigger in the mental spaces of the users – excluding animals qua animals. Additionally, the research also empirically verifies that animalized language use is one of the significant factors behind the speciesist attitudes among Bengali speakers. The research also seeks to sensitize humans towards the hateful nature of the animalized tweets.

Multi-Object Tracking in Heterogeneous environments (MOTHe) for animal video recordings.

Aerial imagery and video recordings of animals are used for many areas of research such as animal behaviour, behavioural neuroscience and field biology. Many automated methods are being developed to extract data from such high-resolution videos. Most of the available tools are developed for videos taken under idealised laboratory conditions. Therefore, the task of animal detection and tracking for videos taken in natural settings remains challenging due to heterogeneous environments. Methods that are useful for field conditions are often difficult to implement and thus remain inaccessible to empirical researchers. To address this gap, we present an open-source package called Multi-Object Tracking in Heterogeneous environments (MOTHe), a Python-based application that uses a basic convolutional neural network for object detection. MOTHe offers a graphical interface to automate the various steps related to animal tracking such as training data generation, animal detection in complex backgrounds and visually tracking animals in the videos. Users can also generate training data and train a new model which can be used for object detection tasks for a completely new dataset. MOTHe doesn't require any sophisticated infrastructure and can be run on basic desktop computing units. We demonstrate MOTHe on six video clips in varying background conditions. These videos are from two species in their natural habitat-wasp colonies on their nests (up to 12 individuals per colony) and antelope herds in four different habitats (up to 156 individuals in a herd). Using MOTHe, we are able to detect and track individuals in all these videos. MOTHe is available as an open-source GitHub repository with a detailed user guide and demonstrations at: https://github.com/tee-lab/MOTHe-GUI.

‘If the desert could speak’: The karretjiemense of the Karoo in My Children Have Faces

Both film-maker Timothy Gabb and anthropologist Michael de Jongh have noticed the disappearance of the karretjiemense, a marginalised people who travel the Karoo desert using donkey carts or karretjies. Having run a petrol station in Prince Albert in the Eastern Cape, author Carol Campbell’s debut novel My Children Have Faces features a family of karretjiemense who wander the Karoo desert and in real ways ‘belong to’ it. This belonging is reflected in the novel through the ‘interchanges and interconnections between [their] human corporeality and the more-than-human’, which ecocritic Stacey Alaimo calls ‘transcorporeality’. It is an engagement that enables the resilience of the tight-knit family to the vulnerabilities of living in the desert in order to escape the pursuit of the murderous Miskiet. Campbell reflects this transcorporeality, fictionally, through naming, through animal imagery and through the motifs of smell and of movement. She also registers how transcorporeality dwindles and family unity breaks down once they leave the desert. Having sold their donkeys and killed Miskiet, they apply for the formal identities they have lacked and head towards a settled life in the village very different to the nomadic life that has defined them up to now.Contribution: This article adds to the emerging field of ecocriticism in South Africa by using the concept of ‘transcorporeality’ to explore the connections between the karretjiemense and the desert Karoo environment in Carol Campbell’s My Children Have Faces (2013).

Blurring Boundaries: The Significance of Horse and Bull Iconography in Occitan and Provençal Cemeteries

ABSTRACT This paper investigates how the use of horse and bull iconography in Occitan and Provençal Catholic cemeteries facilitates the expression of a more-than-human regional identity and, thereby, challenges the boundaries that separate humans from the nonhuman world. The presence of nonhumans in the way humans process and understand death across faiths and cultures is often explained by the fact that humans, as they deal with death, need to make sense of it by reaffirming the singularity of human life, in opposition to that of other beings. Relegating the use of animals in death rituals as a pagan practice associated with idolatry and metempsychosis, Western Christianism has largely banished animals and animal iconography from human deathscapes. However, research in 22 Catholic village cemeteries around the Camargue region indicates that, in this part of France today, animals – especially bulls and horses – are included in the religious and social practice of death. At first glance, the use of this symbolism in the Camargue region and its vicinity seems to subvert the Christian condemnation of animal imagery. Upon closer examination, however, rather than challenging Christian norms, the use of animal imagery merges with Christian signs, indicating that local cemeteries are spaces where humans can express both religious affiliation and regional spiritualism simultaneously. Moreover, by evoking narratives of more-than-human osmosis promoted by the Félibrige literature, this imagery also effaces the boundaries that separate humans from animals and the environment. Therefore, the use of horse and bull iconography in those cemeteries not only blurs the conceptual boundaries between Catholic faith and fé biou (the “religion of the bull” to which the horse also participates) but also between humans and the nonhuman world.

Animal Imagery in Eastern Han Tomb Reliefs from Shanbei 陝北

Wild and fantastical animals climb, fly, scamper, and prance across pictorial stone carvings decorating Eastern Han tomb doors in northern Shaanxi. Alongside dragons and other mythical animals, bears felicitously dance, tigers grin opening their mouths to roar, and other wild animals frolic in swirling cloudscapes. While the same animals can be found in Eastern Han tomb reliefs and mortuary art in other regions, their frequency, emphasis on plasticity and movement, and combination with the yunqi 雲氣 motif are unique to the region. Originating in a hybrid style of art that was created during the Mid-Western Han Dynasty (206 BCE–9 CE), their significance was dependent not so much on any individual creature but on their display as an assemblage of shared forms, behaviors, and habitats. This paper explores how Eastern Han patrons and artists in Shanbei reinvigorated such imagery. It argues that on tomb doors through the region, these same wild and fantastical animals have become a key element of compositions meant to pacify the potentially dangerous realms that awaited the deceased in their postmortem ascension to Heaven (tian 天).