Paper Tigers and Other Therianthropes

  • John Thieme
Chapter
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Abstract

The passage from the first of Rilke’s Duino Elegies (Barbara Gowdy’s The White Bone, one of the novels discussed in this chapter, also evokes Rilke’s response to animal nature by taking a particularly elegiac passage from the Eighth of the Duino Elegies, which refers to animals’ sense of the loss of a warmer, primal condition, analogous to the human memory of a truer, more tender state of originary existence, as its epigraph (Gowdy 2000, p. [ix]).), which Nirmal in The Hungry Tide quotes in his notebook and which I refer to in the concluding paragraph of the previous chapter, takes on a particular resonance if one considers the extent to which it reverses the environmental reality facing many animal species living in the wild today. Rilke’s remark that animals

Keywords

Zoological Society Zoological Garden Tiger Population Paper Tiger White Bone 
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Copyright information

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016

Authors and Affiliations

  • John Thieme
    • 1
  1. 1.University of East AngliaNorwichUK

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