Animality in British Romanticism by Heymans, Peter;

Short description:

This book shows how the Romantics’ aesthetic views of animality interacted with their moral, scientific and religious ideas. It argues that the discourses of the sublime, beautiful and ugly helped the Romantics represent their changing relationship with the animal world and understand the increasingly precarious state of their own humanity.

Long description:

The scientific, political, and industrial revolutions of the Romantic period transformed the status of humans and redefined the concept of species. This book examines literary representations of human and non-human animality in British Romanticism. The book’s novel approach focuses on the role of aesthetic taste in the Romantic understanding of the animal. Concentrating on the discourses of the sublime, the beautiful, and the ugly, Heymans argues that the Romantics’ aesthetic views of animality influenced—and were influenced by—their moral, scientific, political, and theological judgment. The study reveals how feelings of environmental alienation and disgust played a positive moral role in animal rights poetry, why ugliness presented such a major problem for Romantic-period scientists and theologians, and how, in political writings, the violent yet awe-inspiring power of exotic species came to symbolize the beauty and terror of the French Revolution.

Linking the works of Wordsworth, Blake, Coleridge, Byron, the Shelleys, Erasmus Darwin, and William Paley to the theories of Immanuel Kant and Edmund Burke, this book brings an original perspective to the fields of ecocriticism, animal studies, and literature and science studies.

Table of Contents:

Selected Contents: Introduction: The Aesthetics of Species  Part I  1. The Environmental Ethics of Alienation: The Ecological Sublime  2. Green Masochism: Coleridge’s "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner"  3. Hunting for Pleasure: Wordsworth’s Ecofeminism  Part II  4. Humans and Other Moving Things: Wordsworth Visits London (with Deleuze and Guattari)  5. The Cute and the Cruel: Taste, Animality and Sexual Violence in Burke and Blake  6. A Problem of Waste Management: Frankenstein and the Visual Order of Things  Part III  7. Revelation, Reason, Ridicule: The Scientific Sublime  8. A Taste of God: Natural Theology and the Aesthetics of Intelligent Design  9. Beauty with a Past: Evolutionary Aesthetics in Erasmus Darwin’s The Temple of Nature