![]() It was initially, a sort of rag-tag band of intellectual adventurers who loved literature but could not find a niche in the scholarly world. Around 1995, I founded Nature in Legend and Story (NILAS, Inc.), an organization that combines storytelling and scholarship. But soon I had managed to publish two books on animals in literature, The Frog King (1990) and The Parliament of Animals (1992). Today, I shudder how nervy the switch was for a destitute young scholar, who, despite one book and several articles, had not managed to obtain any steady job except mopping floors. Within a few months, I had junked my previous research and devoted my studies to these texts. ![]() ![]() There, without any self-consciousness, was a new world of romance and adventure, filled with turkeys that spoke Arabic, beavers that build like architects, and dogs that solve murders. By accident, I came across an encyclopedia of animals that had been written in the early nineteenth century. I was feeling frustrated in my search for an academic job and even study of literature. ![]() ![]() I first became interested in the literature of animals around the end of the 1980's, not terribly long after I had obtained my PhD in German and intellectual history. ![]()
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