{"id":1594,"date":"2017-04-10T14:33:58","date_gmt":"2017-04-10T14:33:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/?p=1594"},"modified":"2017-04-10T14:33:58","modified_gmt":"2017-04-10T14:33:58","slug":"animals-and-humans-sensibility-and-representation-1650-1820-edited-by-katherine-m-quinsey","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/?p=1594","title":{"rendered":"‘Animals and humans: sensibility and representation, 1650-1820’ edited by Katherine M. Quinsey"},"content":{"rendered":"

From the Voltaire Foundation<\/a>:<\/p>\n

A new edited volume entitled\u00a0Animals and humans: sensibility and representation, 1650-1820\u00a0<\/em>has just been published – including several articles relevant to Romantic period studies.<\/p>\n

Here is a post by the editor\u00a0Katherine M. Quinsey<\/a>\u00a0on her experience of putting the volume together\u00a0(reproduced with permission). Please also see below for details of the book itself.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Animals and humans in the long eighteenth century: an intricate relationship<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

How does a scholarly book get started? In the majority of cases it is bound with the author or editor\u2019s passion and deep-rooted (and often inexplicable) connection with his or her subject matter. For me,\u00a0Animals and humans: sensibility and representation, 1650-1820<\/em><\/a>\u00a0began nearly ten years ago, when I read Kathryn Shevelow\u2019s eminently readable book\u00a0For the love of animals<\/em><\/a>, about the growth of the animal welfare movement in the eighteenth century. Our relationship with animals never ceases to fascinate, as we see from the Wellcome Collection\u2019s current exhibition \u2018Making nature: how we see animals<\/a>\u2019, and animal studies has recently flourished in the academic mainstream. Like Shevelow\u2019s book, it crosses the boundaries between specialised academic study and deeply felt human experience.<\/p>\n

My own beginning with this subject, though, occurred almost in infancy. An innate attraction to animals, these others with whom we co-exist on this planet, is shared by almost all small children and all human cultures in one way or another, and is represented throughout human history. And as we see in very small children, in this oldest relationship of the human species we still find a deep connection and resonance. In bringing together and editing this book, it was wonderfully liberating to be able to combine a lifelong passionate interest in animals with my own professional field of eighteenth-century literary and cultural studies.<\/p>\n

\"Gainsborough,<\/a><\/p>\n

Thomas Gainsborough, Girl with pigs (1782), oil on canvas; Castle Howard Collection. \u00a9 Castle Howard; reproduced by kind permission of the Howard family.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

1650-1820 \u2013 the timeframe we cover in our study \u2013 is the period associated both with the growth of\u00a0experimental science<\/a>\u00a0and the horrors of vivisection, and with the rise of modern humanitarianism. While the defence of animal rights itself goes back to classical times, in the eighteenth century it was directly linked to a growing awareness of universal human rights and a new definition of humanity based on the ability to feel rather than in the primacy of reason. Together with the\u00a0abolitionist<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0feminist movements<\/a>\u00a0of the later eighteenth century, animal welfare came to resemble its modern self, with legislation first enacted in 1820.<\/p>\n

\"Simon<\/a><\/p>\n

Peter Simon after Gainsborough, The Woodman (1791 [1787]), stipple engraving; Sudbury, Gainsborough House. \u00a9 Gainsborough House.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

But in this book we aim to explore more deeply the human relationship with animals in the long eighteenth century, in many different forms of expression. As shown by the different essays in this volume, this ancient relationship challenges not only the arbitrary divisions of Western cultural history (classicism and romanticism, for example), and not only disciplinary boundaries between poetry and science, art and animal husbandry, fiction and natural history, but also the basic assumptions of human self-perception, in which we do not see animals as objects of our \u2018objective\u2019 study, but rather as beings with whom we share a space and who demand a mutual response. A major thread of this book, then, is the re-evaluation of sentiment and sensibility, terms that in the eighteenth century referred to the primacy of emotion, and which were not solely the prerogative of humans. Through the lens of eighteenth-century European culture, contributors to this volume show how the animal presence, whether real or imagined, forces a different reading not only of texts but also of society: how humans are changed, and how we the readers are changed, in our encounters with the non-human other, in history, art, literature, natural science and economics. More deeply, we are reminded of the power and antiquity of this relationship.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

PUBLICATION DETAILS<\/p>\n

Animals and humans: sensibility and representation, 1650-1820<\/a><\/u><\/p>\n

Ed<\/em>. Katherine M. Quinsey<\/p>\n

European culture in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries witnessed a radical redefinition of \u2018humanity\u2019 and its place in the environment, together with a new understanding of animals and their relation to humans. In examining the dynamics of animal-human relations as embodied in the literature, art, farming practices, natural history, religion and philosophy of this period, leading experts explore the roots of much current thinking on interspecies morality and animal welfare.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Katherine M. Quinsey, Introduction<\/p>\n

Ann A. Huse, Edmund Waller\u2019s whales: marine mammals and animal heroism in the early Atlantic<\/p>\n

Lucinda Cole, Guns, ivory and elephant graveyards: the biopolitics of elephants\u2019 teeth<\/p>\n

Anita Guerrini, Animals and natural history in eighteenth-century France<\/p>\n

Denys Van Renen, \u2018A hollow Moan\u2019: the contours of the non-human world in James Thomson\u2019s ‘The Seasons’<\/p>\n

James P. Carson, The great chain of being as an ecological idea<\/p>\n

Kathryn Ready, John Aikin, Joseph Addison and two eighteenth-century Eastern tales of remembered metempsychosis<\/p>\n

Katherine M. Quinsey, \u2018Little Lives in Air\u2019: animal sentience and sensibility in Pope<\/p>\n

Rachel Swinkin, \u2018No, helpless thing\u2019: interspecies intimacy in the poetry of Burns and Barbauld<\/p>\n

Sarah R. Cohen, Thomas Gainsborough\u2019s sensible animals<\/p>\n

Anne Milne, Animal actors: literary pedigrees and bloodlines in eighteenth-century animal breeding<\/p>\n

Irene Fizer, \u2018An egg dropped on the sand\u2019: the natural history of female bastardy from Mark Catesby to Mary Wollstonecraft<\/p>\n

Barbara K. Seeber, Animals and the country-house tradition in Mary Leapor\u2019s \u2018Crumble Hall\u2019 and Jane Austen\u2019s ‘Mansfield Park’<\/p>\n

Epilogue<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment<\/a><\/u>, April 2017<\/p>\n

ISBN 978-0-7294-1193-6, 336 pages, 19 ills<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Recommend<\/a><\/u>\u00a0this book to your librarian<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From the Voltaire Foundation: A new edited volume entitled\u00a0Animals and humans: sensibility and representation, 1650-1820\u00a0has just been published – including several articles relevant to Romantic period studies. Here is a… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pagelayer_contact_templates":[],"_pagelayer_content":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1594"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1594"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1594\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1596,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1594\/revisions\/1596"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1594"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1594"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1594"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}