TY - GEN T1 - Death and compassion : the elephant in Southern African literature A1 - Wylie, Dan LA - English PP - Johannesburg PB - Wits University Press YR - 2018 UL - https://ebooks.jgu.edu.in/Record/jstor_eba_on1129596746 AB - "Elephants are in dire straits - again. They were virtually extirpated from much of Africa by European hunters in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but their numbers resurged for a while in the heyday of late colonial conservation efforts in the twentieth. Now, according to one estimate, an elephant is being killed every fifteen minutes. This at the same time that the reasons for being especially compassionate and protective towards elephants are now so well known that they have become almost a cliché: their high intelligence; rich emotional lives, including a capacity for mourning; caring matriarchal societal structures, and that strangely charismatic grace. Saving elephants is one of the iconic conservation struggles of our time. As a society we must aspire to understand how and why people develop compassion - or fail to do so - and what stories we tell ourselves about animals that reveal the relationship between ourselves and animals. This book is the first study to probe the primary features, and possible effects, of some major literary genres as they pertain to elephants south of the Zambezi over three centuries: Indigenous forms, early European travelogues, hunting accounts, novels, game-ranger memoirs, scientists' accounts and poems. It examines what these literatures imply about the various and diverse attitudes towards elephants, aboutwho shows compassion towards them, in what ways and why. It is the story of a developing contestation between death and compassion, between those who kill and those who love and protect"--Back cover OP - 267 CN - PR9340 .W85 2018eb SN - 9781776142194 SN - 1776142195 SN - 9781776144464 SN - 1776144465 SN - 9781776142187 SN - 1776142187 KW - Englisch, ... KW - Southern African literature (English) : History and criticism. KW - Elephants in literature. KW - Wildlife conservation : Africa, Southern. KW - Littérature de l'Afrique australe (anglaise) : Histoire et critique. KW - Faune : Protection : Afrique australe. KW - Southern Africa. KW - elephants. KW - literature. KW - prose. KW - literary criticism. KW - LITERARY CRITICISM : General. KW - Wildlife conservation KW - Elephants in literature KW - Southern African literature (English) KW - Southern Africa KW - Literatur KW - Elefanten : Motiv KW - Artenschutz : Motiv KW - Südafrika KW - Criticism, interpretation, etc. ER -