Humans and Other Animals in Eighteenth-Century British Culture: Representation, Hybridity, Ethics

by Palmeri,Frank; Palmeri,Frank

• ISBN13: 9780754654759
• ISBN10: 0754654753
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2006-11-28
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

Combining historical and interpretive work, this collection examines changing perceptions of and relations between human and nonhuman animals in Britain over the long eighteenth century. Persistent questions concern modes of representing animals and animal-human hybrids, as well as the ethical issues raised by the human uses of other animals. From the animal men of Thomas Rowlandson to the part animal-part human creature of Victor Frankenstein, hybridity serves less as a metaphor than as a metonym for the intersections of humans and other animals. The contributors address such recurring questions as the implications of the Enlightenment project of naming and classifying animals, the equating of non-European races and nonhuman animals in early ethnographic texts, and the desire to distinguish the purely human from the entirely nonhuman animal. Gulliver's Travels and works by Mary and Percy Shelley emerge as key texts for this study. The volume will be of interest to scholars and students who work in animal, colonial, gender, and cultural studies; and will appeal to general readers concerned with the representation of animals and their treatment by humans.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	vii
Acknowledgments	ix
List of Contributors	x
Introduction: Representation, Hybridity, Ethics	1	(12)
Frank Palmeri
Gross Metempsychosis and Eastern Soul	13	(18)
Chi-ming Yang
The Lady and the Lapdog: Mixed Ethnicity in Constantinople, Fashionable Pets in Britain	31	(18)
Theresa Braunschneider
Gulliver's Travels and Studies of Skin Color in the Royal Society	49	(18)
Cristina Malcolmson
Gulliver the Houyahoo: Swift, Locke, and the Ethics of Excessive Individualism	67	(16)
Allen Michie
The Autocritique of Fables	83	(18)
Frank Palmeri
Animal Nomenclature: Facing Other Animals	101	(18)
Richard Nash
Man's Animal Nature: Science, Art, and Satire in Thomas Rowlandson's ``Studies in Comparative Anatomy''	119	(18)
Arline Meyer
``Listen to Me'': Frankenstein as an Appeal to Mercy and Justice, on Behalf of the Persecuted Animals	137	(16)
Stephanie Rowe
Shelley's Great Chain of Being: From ``blind worms'' to ``new-fledged eagles''	153	(16)
Lisbeth Chapin
Gulliver and the Lives of Animals	169	(10)
Jonathan Lamb
Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: The Play of Species in Pynchon's Mason & Dixon	179	(22)
Elizabeth Jane Wall Hinds
Bibliography	201	(14)
Index	215