A moment is the instant between a glance and a memory. Life is filled with ups and downs. It's like a roller coaster ride through the ectoplasm of time and space. Every now and then, a rider falls off into the uncertainty of the abyss. These unlucky souls are given a destiny of never-ending turmoil and illusion. This accelerating fall only slows enough for them to realize their fate, then speeds again. The following poems, stories and lyrics are their diaries.

Throughout the 19th century animals were integrated into staged scenarios of confrontation, ranging from lion acts in small cages to large-scale re-enactments of war. Initially presenting a handful of exotic animals, travelling menageries grew to contain multiple species in their thousands. These 19th-century menageries entrenched beliefs about the human right to exploit nature through war-like practices against other animal species. Animal shows became a stimulus for antisocial behaviour as locals taunted animals, caused fights, and even turned into violent mobs. Human societal problems were difficult to separate from issues of cruelty to animals. Apart from reflecting human capacity for fighting and aggression, and the belief in human dominance over nature, these animal performances also echoed cultural fascination with conflict, war and colonial expansion, as the grand spectacles of imperial power reinforced state authority and enhanced public displays of nationhood and nationalistic evocations of colonial empires. Fighting nature is an insightful analysis of the historical legacy of 19th-century colonialism, war, animal acquisition and transportation. This legacy of entrenched beliefs about the human right to exploit other animal species is yet to be defeated. "Peta Tait brings to the book an impressive scholarly command of the documentary material, from which she draws a range of vivid examples and revealing analyses of human–animal confrontation in popular entertainments ... The book is written with verve and clarity, and will be of interest to a wide readership in performance studies and cultural history." Professor Jane R. Goodall, Western Sydney University Peta Tait FAHA is Professor of Theatre and Drama at La Trobe University and Visiting Professor at the University of Wollongong, and author of Wild and dangerous performances: animals, emotions, circus (2012).

The close interdependency of animal emissaries and new media from early European colonial encounters with the exotic to today's proliferation of animals in digital networks. From cat videos to corporate logos, digital screens and spaces are crowded with animal bodies. In Virtual Menageries, Jody Berland examines the role of animals in the spread of global communications. Her richly illustrated study links the contemporary proliferation of animals on social media to the collection of exotic animals in the formative years of transcontinental exploration and expansion. By tracing previously unseen parallels across the history of exotic and digital menageries, Berland shows how and why animals came to bridge peoples, territories, and technologies in the expansion of colonial and capitalist cultures. Berland's genealogy of the virtual menagerie begins in 1414 when a ruler in Bengal sent a Kenyan giraffe to join a Chinese emperor's menagerie. It maps the beaver's role in the colonial conquest of Canada and examines the appearances of animals in early moving pictures. The menagerie is reinvented for the digital age when image and sound designers use parts or images of animals to ensure the affective promise and commercial spread of an emergent digital infrastructure. These animal images are emissaries that enliven and domesticate the ever-expanding field of mediation. Virtual Menageries offers a unique account of animals and animal images as mediators that encourage complicated emotional, economic, and aesthetic investment in changing practices of connection.

Menagerie is the story of the panoply of exotic animals that were brought into Britain from time immemorial until the foundation of the London Zoo — a tale replete with the extravagant, the eccentric, and — on occasion — the downright bizarre. From Henry III's elephant at the Tower, to George IV's love affair with Britain's first giraffe and Lady Castlereagh's recalcitrant ostriches, Caroline Grigson's tour through the centuries amounts to the first detailed history of exotic animals in Britain. On the way we encounter a host of fascinating and outlandish creatures, including the first peacocks and popinjays, Thomas More's monkey, James I's cassowaries in St James's Park, and Lord Clive's zebra — which refused to mate with a donkey, until the donkey was painted with stripes. But this is not just the story of the animals themselves. It also the story of all those who came into contact with them: the people who owned them, the merchants who bought and sold them, the seamen who carried them to our shores, the naturalists who wrote about them, the artists who painted them, the itinerant showmen who worked with them, the collectors who collected them. And last but not least, it is about all those who simply came to see and wonder at them, from kings, queens, and nobles to ordinary men, women, and children, often impelled by no more than simple curiosity and a craving for novelty.

Human Menageries: Freak Show Legacies in Contemporary American Literature and Popular Culture Human Menageries examines representations of freaks in late-twentieth century and early-twenty-first century American literature and popular culture. Freak shows reached the height of their popularity between 1840 and 1940, and the performative conventions they established for the display of extraordinary bodies continue within contemporary American culture as a means of defining bodily normalcy and deviance through spectacular visual representation. While some contemporary relocations make use of freak representations to reinforce bodily norms, others appropriate freak identity and conventions in a subversive fashion. Human Menageries enacts a close and historically contextual reading of the work of contemporary writers, visual artists, and performers such as Margaret Cho, Loren Cameron, Octavia E. Butler, Jewelle Gomez, Charlaine Harris, Aimee Bender, and Lady Gaga who revise and appropriate conventions from the historic freak show for purposes of social subversion and critique. This project immerses itself in current discussions within freak studies (a subfield of disability studies initiated by scholars such as Robert Bogdan, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, and Rachel Adams) that question to what extent bodily spectacles function as forms of exploitation or liberation. Human Menageries mediates this divide by theorizing the multifaceted effects of contemporary relocations of the American freak show and arguing that cultural producers use the freak show's performative conventions to challenge norms of embodiment, draw intersectional connections between multiple non-normative identity positions, and provide interdisciplinary strategies for reading human bodies that gesture toward the creation of a reality in which embodied difference is not regarded as remarkable, but as a standard human attribute.