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" Contemporary writers use animal-transformation themes to explore issues of gender, sexuality, race, culture, and the process of transformation...just as storytellers have done, all over the world, for many centuries past. One distinct change marks modern retellings, however, reflecting our changed relationship to animals and nature. In a society in which most of us will never encounter true danger in the woods, the big white bear who comes knocking at the door [in fairy tales] is not such a frightening prospective husband now; instead, he's exotic, almost appealing.Whereas once wilderness was threatening to civilization, now it's been tamed and cultivated; the dangers of the animal world have a nostalgic quality, removed as they are from our daily existence. This removal gives " the wild" a different kind of power; it's something we long for rather than fear. The shape-shifter, the were-creature, the stag-headed god from the heart of the woods--they come from a place we'd almost forgotten: the untracked forests of the past; the primeval forests of the mythic imagination; the forests of our childhood fantasies: untouched, unspoiled, limitless.Likewise, tales of Animal Brides and Bridegrooms are steeped in an ancient magic and yet powerfully relevant to our lives today. They remind us of the wild within us...and also within our lovers and spouses, the part of them we can never quite know. They represent the Others who live beside us--cat and mouse and coyote and owl--and the Others who live only in the dreams and nightmares of our imaginations. For thousands of years, their tales have emerged from the place where we draw the boundary lines between animals and human beings, the natural world and civilization, women and men, magic and illusion, fiction and the lives we live. "
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" The landscape of human emotion is ominously changing. The visceral sensation of loneliness and solitude is no longer as palpable and intellectually profound as it was a couple of decades ago because technology has already relieved us, as much as possible, from the burden of any emotional and existential isolation. The intense feeling of being nostalgic or being alone, for instance, is receding from the human emotion because we can now communicate with live video and send messages through any social media to a distant friend or loved one. Consequently, the exponential progress of technology is altering the phenomenological experience of human sensation, robbing us of our ability to get in touch with our humanity and reflect upon the triumphs and madness of our techno-society. Ironically, in our obstinate desire to humanize robots and Artificial Intelligence, our individual existence is, in turn, being digitized and robotized by our own technological inventions. Horribilis! (Danny Castillones Sillada, The Alienation of Solitude and Sorrow) "
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