1st Edition
Kindred Brutes: Animals in Romantic-Period Writing
By Christine Kenyon-Jones
Copyright 2001
240 Pages
by
Routledge
240 Pages
by
Routledge
240 Pages
by
Routledge
Also available as eBook on:
Exploring the significance of animals in Romantic-period writing, this new study shows how in this period they were seen as both newly different from humankind (subjects in their own right, rather than simply humanity's tools or adjuncts) and also as newly similar, with the ability to feel and perhaps to think like human beings. Approaches to animals are reviewed in a wide range of the period's... Read more
Contents: Introduction: ’Animals are good to think with’; Animals dead and alive: pets, and politics poetry in the Romantic period; Children’s animals: Locke, Rousseau, Coleridge and the instruction/imagination debate; Political animals: bull-fighting, bull-baiting and Childe Harold I; Animals as food: Shelley, Byron and the ideology of eating; Animals and nature: beasts, birds and Wordsworth’s ecological credentials; Evolutionary animals: science and imagination between the Darwins; In conclusion: animals then and now; Index.
Biography
Christine Kenyon-Jones
’An indispensable work of scholarship on the cultural, political, scientific, social, and literary responses to the animal in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Byronists will discover that the noble lord had many things to say on this subject. A pleasure to read.’ Charles E. Robinson, Professor of English, University of Delaware; Executive Director, The Byron Society of America ’Christine Kenyon-Jones has found a genuinely new area of interest within the much-studied field of early nineteenth-century English poetry. This elegantly written study intersects in all sorts of interesting ways with other recent work -- on Romanticism and ecology, on questions of gender and the body, nature and nurture, and so forth -- whilst continuously maintaining its distinctiveness of voice and focus. Throughout the book, and especially when attention is fixed on Lord Byron, fascinating material is discussed in a lively and informed manner.’ Jonathan Bate, Leverhulme Research Professor & King Alfred Professor, University of Liverpool '... makes an important contribution to our understanding of the Romantic period.' European Romantic Review
