Includes bibliographical references (pages 299-319) and index.
Contents:
Animals and the country-house tradition in Mary Leapor's 'Crumble Hall' and Jane Austen's Mansfield Park / Barbara K. Seeber. Edmund Waller's whales: marine mammals and animal heroism in the early Atlantic / Ann A. Huse -- Guns, ivory and elephant graveyards: the biopolitics of elephants' teeth / Lucinda Cole -- Animals and natural history in eighteenth-century France / Anita Guerrini -- 'A hollow Moan': the contours of the non-human world in James Thomson's The Seasons / Denys Van Renen -- The great chain of being as an ecological idea / James P. Carson -- John Aikin, Joseph Addison and two eighteenth-century Eastern tales of remembered metempsychosis / Kathryn Ready -- 'Little Lives in Air': animal sentience and sensibility in Pope / Katherine M. Quinsey -- 'No, helpless thing': interspecies intimacy in the poetry of Burns and Barbauld / Rachel Swinkin -- Thomas Gainsborough's sensible animals / Sarah R. Cohen -- Animal actors: literary pedigrees and bloodlines in eighteenth-century animal breeding / Anne Milne -- 'An egg dropped on the sand': the natural history of female bastardy from Mark Catesby to Mary Wollstonecraft / Irene Fizer -- Animals and the country-house tradition in Mary Leapor's 'Crumble Hall' and Jane Austen's Mansfield Park / Barbara K. Seeber.
Summary:
"The animal-human relationship challenged not only disciplinary boundaries - between poetry and science, art and animal husbandry, natural history and fiction - but also the basic assumptions of human intellectual and cultural activity, expression, and self-perception. This is specifically apparent in the re-evaluation of sentiment and sensibility, which constitutes a major theme of this chronologically organised volume. Authors engage with contemporary reactions to the commodification of animals during the period of British imperialism, tracing how eighteenth-century ecological consciousness and notions of animal identity and welfare emerged from earlier, traditional models of the cosmos, reassessing late eighteenth-century poetic representations of the sentimental encounter with the animal other. They show how human experience was no longer viewed as an iterative process but as one continually shaped by the other. In concluding chapters authors highlight the political resonances of the animal-human relationship as it was used both to represent and to redress the injustices between humans as well as between humans and animals. Through a multi-faceted study of eighteenth-century European culture, authors reveal how the animal presence - both real and imagined - forces a different reading not only of texts but also of society"--Back cover.
Series:
Oxford University studies in the Enlightenment, 0435-2866 ; 2017:04
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.