In Literature
The short story Romulus (1883) by the Danish author Karl Gjellerup features cruelty to a noble race horse. The story was inspired by a contemporary case where the Royal Chamberlain was accused of animal cruelty.
The play Equus from 1973 elaborates the psychology of a young horse mutilator. It also was inspired by a then-contemporary series of horse blindings. Based on the play, the film Equus was produced in 1977.
In Dostoyevsky's novel Crime and Punishment, the protagonist Raskolnikov has a dream about a mare being whipped and eventually bludgeoned to death with an iron bar by a drunken man, while a large crowd encourages and helps him.
Read more about this topic: Horse-ripping
Famous quotes containing the word literature:
“A book is not an autonomous entity: it is a relation, an axis of innumerable relations. One literature differs from another, be it earlier or later, not because of the texts but because of the way they are read: if I could read any page from the present time—this one, for instance—as it will be read in the year 2000, I would know what the literature of the year 2000 would be like.”
—Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986)
“Literature that is not the breath of contemporary society, that dares not transmit the pains and fears of that society, that does not warn in time against threatening moral and social dangers—such literature does not deserve the name of literature; it is only a façade. Such literature loses the confidence of its own people, and its published works are used as wastepaper instead of being read.”
—Alexander Solzhenitsyn (b. 1918)