The Cricket Beasts


Book Description

‘Hey, are you bored with your dull and monotonous life? Do you waste all your spare time reading dull books like Shakespeare and Charles Dickens? Is your life too tame and domesticated? Do you want to inject some excitement and exuberance into it? Do you want to improve your lung power and be able to yell and shriek at hundred decibels for hours and hours? Do you want to get lots of friends of all ages, religions and races who think and act alike? Do you want to extract the maximum out of your gigantic high definition TV? Do you want to be at the edge of your living room couch shivering in nail biting suspense and anticipation? Do you…’ ‘Yes! Yes! Quick, tell me what I need to do.’ ‘Simple. Just become a real cricket fan and you will achieve all that I just said.’ ‘What? Don’t be silly! How will that help? I am already a cricket fan in case you didn’t know.’ ‘Hah! Are you? Don’t make me laugh! You are like a lamb, an insult to all real cricket fans.’‘ Hey, what do you mean by insult to all fans?’ ‘Cool down! What I mean is you look and act too domesticated to be called a real cricket fan. You are still not that fire and brimstone material of cricket – The Ultimate Cricket Fan.’ ‘Ultimate cricket fan? Who is that?’ ‘An explosive beast that no one can tame.’




Beasts of Love


Book Description

In Le Bestiare d'amour and the Response, a medieval chancellor's erotic bestiary to a woman is countered by the woman's passionate protest against the cleric's misogynistic presuppositions. Beer presents a close, linear reading of the two literary texts.




Humans, Beasts, and Ghosts


Book Description

This book brings together the essay collection "Written in the margins of life (Xie zai ren sheng bian shang)" and the short story collection "Human, beast, ghost (Ren shou gui)."




Kenny & the Book of Beasts


Book Description

In this highly anticipated sequel to New York Times bestselling and Caldecott Honor–winning author Tony DiTerlizzi’s Kenny and the Dragon, Kenny must cope with many changes in his life—including the fear that he’s losing his best friend. What can come between two best friends? Time has passed since Kenny Rabbit’s last adventure with his best friend, the legendary dragon Grahame, and a lot has changed in the sleepy village of Roundbrook. For starters, Kenny has a whole litter of baby sisters. His friends are at different schools and Sir George is off adventuring. At least Kenny still has his very best friend, Grahame. That’s before Dante arrives. Dante is a legendary manticore and an old friend of Grahame’s. Old friends spend a lot of time catching up. And that catching up does not involve Kenny. But there’s a Witch to defeat, a pal to rescue, and a mysterious book to unlock. And those are quests for best friends, not old friends. Right?




Folk-taxonomies in Early English


Book Description

A folk-taxonomy is a semantic field that represents the particular way in which a language imposes structure and order upon the myriad impressions of human experience and perception. Thus, for example, the experience of color in modem English is structured around an inventory of twelve "basic" color terms; but languages vary in the number of basic color terms used, from thirteen or fourteen terms to as few as two or three. Anthropological linguists have been interested in the comparative study of folk-taxonomies across contemporary languages, and in their studies they have sometimes proposed evolutionary models for the development and elaboration of these taxonomies. The evolutionary models have implications for historical linguistics, but there have been very few studies of the historical development of a folk-taxonomy within a language or within a language family. Folk-Taxonomies in Early English undertakes this task for English, and to some extent for the Germanic and Indo-European language families. The semantic fields studied are basic color terms, seasons of the year, geometric shapes, the five senses, the folk-psychology of mind and soul, and basic plant and animal life-forms. Anderson's emphasis is on folk-taxonomies in Old and Middle English, and also on the implications of semantic analysis for our reading of early English literary texts.




Taming the Beast


Book Description

Jack “Beast” Beasley has been dealt a tough hand in life: his family has been torn apart, and he’s been left to pick up the pieces, with his younger sister Michelle. Only two factors keep Jack from throwing in the towel: his love for his sister and his passion for cricket. Jack must confront his own demons and battle against his own frustrations, his fiery temper, and pent-up anger, getting him into regular trouble at school and on the cricket field. Jack’s dream is to be the best cricketer he can be, with aspirations of playing for the Richmond 1st X1, pushing through to first-class cricket and then his ultimate dream: wearing the famous Baggy Green cap and representing Australia as a test cricketer. In Taming the Beast, we follow Jack Beasley and the many ups and downs and twists and turns along his journey. Will all of Jack’s hard work pay off? Will his determination prevail? Will he be able to placate his inner demons? Will he “tame the beast”?







The Most Beloved Animal Tales for Christmas Eve


Book Description

This holiday, Musaicum Books presents to you this unique collection of the greatest Christmas classics and the most beloved animal tales to warm up your heart and rekindle your holiday sparkle: The Tailor of Gloucester (Beatrix Potter) The Tale of Peter Rabbit (Beatrix Potter) Black Beauty (Anna Sewell) The Wind in the Willows (Kenneth Grahame) The Wonderful Wizard of OZ (L. Frank Baum) The Adventures of Reddy Fox (Thornton Burgess) The Adventures of Johnny Chuck (Thornton Burgess) The Adventures of Peter Cottontail (Thornton Burgess) The Old Mother West Wind (Thornton Burgess) The Story of Doctor Dolittle (Hugh Lofting) The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle (Hugh Lofting) The Story of a Nodding Donkey (Laura Lee Hope) Little Bun Rabbit (L. Frank Baum) The Velveteen Rabbit (Margery Williams) The Nutcracker and the Mouse King (E. T. A. Hoffmann) The Story of a Stuffed Elephant (Laura Lee Hope) Peace on Earth, Good-Will to Dogs (Eleanor Hallowell Abbott) Kittyboy's Christmas (Amy Ella Blanchard) The Naughty Reindeer (Amelia C. Houghton) Miss Muffet's Christmas Party (Samuel McChord Crothers) The Animals' Christmas Tree (John Punnett Peters) The Mouse and the Moonbeam (Eugene Field) The Cricket on the Hearth (Charles Dickens) The Christmas Cuckoo (Frances Browne) The Silver Hen (Mary E. Wilkins Freeman) The Sparrow and the Fairy (Georgianna M. Bishop) The Wonderful Bird (Georgianna M. Bishop) The Little Mud-Sparrows (Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward) The Little Gray Lamb (Archibald Beresford Sullivan) How Freckle Frog Made Herself Pretty (Charlotte B. Herr) Cat and Dog Stories (Walter Crane)




The Animal and the Daemon in Early China


Book Description

Exploring the cultural perception of animals in early Chinese thought, this careful reading of Warring States and Han dynasty writings analyzes how views of animals were linked to human self perception and investigates the role of the animal world in the conception of ideals of sagehood and socio-political authority. Roel Sterckx shows how perceptions of the animal world influenced early Chinese views of man's place among the living species and in the world at large. He argues that the classic Chinese perception of the world did not insist on clear categorical or ontological boundaries between animals, humans, and other creatures such as ghosts and spirits. Instead the animal realm was positioned as part of an organic whole and the mutual relationships among the living species—both as natural and cultural creatures—were characterized as contingent, continuous, and interdependent.




Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance


Book Description

Lesser Living Creatures examines literary and cultural texts from early modern England in order to understand how people in that era thought about—and with—insect and arachnid life. Designed for the classroom, the book comprises two volumes—Insects and Concepts—that can be used together or independently. Each addresses the collaborative, multigenerational research that produced early modern natural history and provides new insights into the old question of what it means to be human in a world populated by beasts large and small. Volume 1, Insects, examines how insects burrowed into the literal and symbolic economies of the era. The contributors consider diminutive creatures—such as bees and beetles, flies and fleas, silkworms and spiders—and their depictions in plays, poetry, fables, natural histories, and more. In doing so, they illuminate how early modern science and literature worked as intersecting systems of knowledge production about the natural world and show definitively how insect life was, and remains, intimately entangled with human life. In addition to the editors, contributors to this volume include Chris Barrett, Roya Biggie, Bruce Boehrer, Gary Bouchard, Dan Brayton, Eric Brown, Mary Baine Campbell, Perry Guevara, Shannon Kelley, Emily King, Karen Raber, Kathryn Vomero Santos, Donovan Sherman, and Steven Swarbrick.