The story revolves around a kid named Govardhan who happens to meet some animals who can apparently talk like humans. The events unfold in an apartment community. The story is designed for small children to imbibe values like compassion, care, selflessness and love for nature and animals. Soon the bonding between Govardhan and the animals grew stronger. Later the kid learns about the witches who had petted these animals and the magic potion that gave them the ability to acquire human languages. Eventually the effect of the potion would fade away. Can the boy retrievie the rest of the potion saved in a secret chamber underground? Can the animals talk like humans again? The story would envelope the readers into a heartwarming world of fairies and magic. Boy and the talking animals started off as bedtime stories for the author's 3-yearold son Govardhan featuring the kid himself as the central character. It was later developed into a short novel.

In her reappraisal of canonical works such as Black Beauty, Beautiful Joe, Wind in the Willows, and Peter Rabbit, Tess Cosslett traces how nineteenth-century debates about the human and animal intersected with, or left their mark on, the venerable genre of the animal story written for children. Effortlessly applying a range of critical approaches, from Bakhtinian ideas of the carnivalesque to feminist, postcolonial, and ecocritical theory, she raises important questions about the construction of the child reader, the qualifications of the implied author, and the possibilities of children's literature compared with literature written for adults. Perhaps most crucially, Cosslett examines how the issues of animal speech and animal subjectivity were managed, at a time when the possession of language and consciousness had become a vital sign of the difference between humans and animals. Topics of great contemporary concern, such as the relation of the human and the natural, masculine and feminine, child and adult, are investigated within their nineteenth-century contexts, making this an important book for nineteenth-century scholars, children's literature specialists, and historians of science and childhood.

Talking-animal tales have conveyed anticruelty messages since the 18th-century beginnings of children's literature. Yet only in the modern period have animal characters become true subjects rather than objects of human neglect or benevolence. Modern fantasies reflect the shift from animal welfare to animal rights in 20th-century public discourse. This revolution in literary animal-human relations began with Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and continued with the work of Kenneth Grahame, Hugh Lofting, P.L. Travers and E. B. White. Beginning with the ideas of literary theorist Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin, this book examines ways in which animal characters gain an aura of authority through using language and then participate in reversals of power. The author provides a close reading of 10 acclaimed British and American children's fantasies or series published before 1975. Authors whose work has received little scholarly attention are also covered, including Robert Lawson, George Selden and Robert C. O'Brien.

"Joni Murphy’s inventive and beautiful allegory depicts a city enmeshed in climate collapse, blinded to the signs of its imminent destruction by petty hatreds and monstrous greed: that is, the world we are living in now. Talking Animals is an Orwellian tale of totalitarianism in action, but the animals on this farm are much cuter, and they make better puns." —Chris Kraus, author of I Love Dick and After Kathy Acker A fable for our times, Joni Murphy’s Talking Animals takes place in an all-animal world where creatures rather like us are forced to deal with an all-too-familiar landscape of soul-crushing jobs, polluted oceans, and a creeping sense of doom. It’s New York City, nowish. Lemurs brew espresso. Birds tend bar. There are bears on Wall Street, and a billionaire racehorse is mayor. Sea creatures are viewed with fear and disgust and there’s chatter about building a wall to keep them out. Alfonzo is a moody alpaca. His friend Mitchell is a sociable llama. They both work at City Hall, but their true passions are noise music and underground politics. Partly to meet girls, partly because the world might be ending, these lowly bureaucrats embark on an unlikely mission to expose the corrupt system that’s destroying the city from within. Their project takes them from the city’s bowels to its extremities, where they encounter the Sea Equality Revolutionary Front, who are either a group of dangerous radicals or an inspiring liberation movement. In this novel, at last, nature kvetches and grieves, while talking animals offer us a kind of solace in the guise of dumb jokes. This is mass extinction as told by BoJack Horseman. This is The Fantastic Mr. Fox journeying through Kafka's Amerika. This is dogs and cats, living together. Talking Animals is an urgent allegory about friendship, art, and the elemental struggle to change one’s life under the low ceiling of capitalism.

In a celebration of the wild and wonderful world of cartooning, twenty-three contemporary artists step out from behind their drawing boards and take a bow alongside their art.

This book is a volume in the Penn Press Anniversary Collection. To mark its 125th anniversary in 2015, the University of Pennsylvania Press rereleased more than 1,100 titles from Penn Press's distinguished backlist from 1899-1999 that had fallen out of print. Spanning an entire century, the Anniversary Collection offers peer-reviewed scholarship in a wide range of subject areas.

The first editon was called "the most valuable film reference in several years" by Library Journal. The new edition published in hardcover in 2001 includes more than 670 entries. The current work is a paperback reprint of that edition. Each entry contains a mini-essay that defines the topic, followed by a chronological list of representative films. From the Abominable Snowman to Zorro, this encyclopedia provides film scholars and fans with an easy-to-use reference for researching film themes or tracking down obscure movies on subjects such as suspended animation, viral epidemics, robots, submarines, reincarnation, ventriloquists and the Olympics ("Excellent" said Cult Movies). The volume also contains an extensive list of film characters and series, including B-movie detectives, Western heroes, made-for-television film series, and foreign film heroes and villains.

A thorough investigation of the saint and animal topos: its origins, growth and development.

This textbook provides a full overview of human-animal studies. It focuses on the conceptual construction of animals in American culture and the way in which it reinforces and perpetuates hierarchical human relationships rooted in racism, sexism, and class privilege.

Annotation Essays which state the fundamentals of Jung's psychological system: "On the Psychology of the Unconscious" and "The Relations Between the Ego and the Unconscious," with their original versions in an appendix.