Domestication Western-Style: Fantasies of Harmony and the Violence of Plasticity in Mary O'Hara's My Friend Flicka.
Historically, animal characters and animal-child encounters in children's narratives have served largely metaphorical functions. More recently, scholars have become interested in exploring literary human-animal relations as interesting in and of themselves and not purely as background for promoting...
| Publicado en: | Comparative American Studies Vol. 21; no. 1/2; pp. 101 - 118 |
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| Formato: | Artículo |
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Taylor & Francis Ltd
Mar-Jun2024
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| Acceso en línea: | Ver este registro en EBSCOhost |
| fields | @attributes: recordID: 1 pdfLink: plink: https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=hlh&AN=176934609&site=ehost-live header: @attributes: shortDbName: hlh uiTerm: 176934609 longDbName: Humanities International Complete uiTag: AN controlInfo: bkinfo: jinfo: jid: 14775700 VA2 jtl: Comparative American Studies issn: 14775700 maglogo: N pubinfo: dt: Mar-Jun2024 vid: 21 iid: 1/2 pid: 377 pub: Taylor & Francis Ltd artinfo: ui: 176934609 10.1080/14775700.2023.2282240 ppf: 101 ppct: 17 formats: fmt: – @attributes: type: T – @attributes: type: P size: 373KB tig: atl: Domestication Western-Style: Fantasies of Harmony and the Violence of Plasticity in Mary O'Hara's My Friend Flicka. aug: au: Włodarczyk, Justyna affil: Institute of English Studies, Faculty of Modern Languages, University of Warsaw, Warsaw, Poland su: Domestication of animals Human ecology Ethical problems Dilemma Violence Coming of age Metaphor sug: subj: Domestication of animals Human ecology Ethical problems Dilemma Violence Coming of age Metaphor keyword: children's literature discipline domestication encounter value horses Mary O'Hara plasticity training ab: Historically, animal characters and animal-child encounters in children's narratives have served largely metaphorical functions. More recently, scholars have become interested in exploring literary human-animal relations as interesting in and of themselves and not purely as background for promoting values and attitudes considered desirable for adolescent readers. The article proposes a reading of Mary O'Hara's novel My Friend Flicka (O'Hara 1941) which embeds the relationship between the human protagonist and the horse in the wider stories of equine domestication and the settling of the Western frontier. In effect, while the story of Ken and Flicka is read as a metaphor – a synecdoche even – it is not a metaphor of human-human encounters but of the contradictions and ethical dilemmas inherent to the process of human-directed animal domestication in a capitalist settler colonial society. Ken's coming of age through the story of love and loss is representative of dilemmas that humans engaged in processes of domestication have had to grapple with: Ken must come to terms with the violence of domestication. Concurrently, Flicka's story of pain, fear, and love is read not just as the unique story of an individual horse but of the generations of equines that have been forced to adapt to an environment shaped by human dominance. pubtype: Academic Journal doctype: Article src: R language: English refInfo: copyright: @attributes: flag: Y custom: Copyright of Comparative American Studies is the property of Taylor & Francis Ltd and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites without the copyright holder's express written permission. Additionally, content may not be used with any artificial intelligence tools or machine learning technologies. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. item: Comparative American Studies holder: Taylor & Francis Ltd dt: @attributes: year: 2024 holdings: @attributes: islocal: N |
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