By staging human-animal encounters, Romantic literature and art repeatedly questioned how "human" animals could be and how "animal" humans in fact are. Romantic-era authors and artists often depicted perplexing animal intrusions upon humans. Sometimes the intruders were mystifying or terrifying, like Coleridge’s albatross or Poe’s raven; sometimes they were mundane, as in “The Swallow” by Smith or “To a Mouse” by Burns-regardless, encounters with animal-others occasioned Romantic musings. This collection builds on existing scholarship while deploying new methodological approaches from gender studies, posthumanism, postcolonialism, disability studies, and digital studies to deepen our understanding of why animal-human encounters were so prevalent in the creative work and cultural discourse of the Romantic period, including the rhetoric of social movements like transatlantic abolitionism. Taken together, the chapters demonstrate the range and complexity of Romantic representations of human-animal interactions and conceptualizations of animality, nonhuman life, and not-wholly-human life.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
Introduction
Michael Demson and Christopher R. Clason
Part One: The Pervasion of Animal Figures
Chapter 1: Animals in Abolition
Alastair Hunt
Chapter 2: Imperial Animals and Aboriginal People: Collecting the South Pacific in Mary Ann Parker’s A Voyage Round the World
Pamela Buck
Chapter 3: The Politics of the Pig from Burke to Beckett
John Gardner
Part Two: The Eccentricity of Animal Figures
Chapter 4: Familiarity and Flights of Imagination: Romantic Birds
Jane Spencer
Chapter 5: The Poodle’s Perspective in E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Lebensansichten des Katers Murr
Christopher R. Clason
Chapter 6: Weird Creatures: Romantic-era Zoophytes, The Great Chain of Being, and Posthumanist Life
Allison Dushane
Part Three: The Exhibition of Human-Animal Entanglements
Chapter 7: The Monkey Artist and His Donkey Public: French Art-World Caricature, the Animal Menagerie, and the Digital Humanities
Kathryn Desplanque
Chapter 8: Horse Paintings: Problems of Communication and Politics in French Romantic Painting
Peter Erickson
Chapter 9: The Beasts of Romantic Melodrama
Frederick Burwick
Acknowledgments
Bibliography
Notes on Contributors
Index
Introduction 1
Michael Demson and Christopher R. Clason
PA R T O N E : The Pervasion of
Animal Figures
1 Animals in Abolition 19
Alastair Hunt
2 Imperial Animals and Aboriginal People:
Collecting the South Pacific in Mary Ann Parker’s
A Voyage Round the World 38
Pamela Buck
3 The Politics of the Pig from Burke to Beckett 53
John Gardner
PA R T TWO : The Eccentricity of
Animal Figures
4 Familiarity and Flights of Imagination:
Romantic Birds 73
Jane Spencer
5 The Poodle’s Perspective in E.T.A. Hoffmann’s
Lebensansichten des Katers Murr 91
Christopher R. Clason
6 Weird Creatures: Romantic-Era
Zoophytes, the
Great
Chain of Being, and Posthumanist Life 112
Allison Dushane
PA R T T H R E E : The Exhibition of
Human-Animal
Entanglements
7 The Monkey Artist and His Donkey Public:
French Art-World
Caricature, the Animal
Menagerie, and the Digital Humanities 133
Kathryn Desplanque
8 Horse
Paintings: Problems
of Communication
and Politics in French Romantic Painting 161
Peter Erickson
9 The Beasts of Romantic Melodrama 181
Frederick Burwick
Acknowledgments
201
Bibliography 203
Notes on Contributors 221
Index 000
