What did British people in the late eighteenth century think and feel about their relationship to nonhuman animals? This book shows how an appreciation of human-animal similarity and a literature of compassion for animals developed in the same years during which radical thinkers were first basing political demands on the concept of natural and universal human rights. Some people began to conceptualise animal rights as an extension of the rights of man and woman. But
because oppressed people had to insist on their own separation from animals in order to claim the right to a full share in human privileges, the relationship between human and animal rights was
fraught and complex. This book examines that relationship in chapters covering the abolition movement, early feminism, and the political reform movement. Donkeys, pigs, apes and many other literary animals became central metaphors within political discourse, fought over in the struggle for rights and freedoms; while at the same time more and more writers became interested in exploring the experiences of animals themselves. We learn how children's writers pioneered
narrative techniques for representing animal subjectivity, and how the anti-cruelty campaign of the early 1800s drew on the legacy of 1790s radicalism. Coleridge, Wordsworth, Clare, Southey, Blake,
Wollstonecraft, Equiano, Dorothy Kilner, Thomas Spence, Mary Hays, Ignatius Sancho, Anna Letitia Barbauld, John Oswald, John Lawrence, and Thomas Erskine are just a few of the writers considered. Along with other canonical and non-canonical writers of many disciplines, they placed nonhuman animals at the heart of British literature in the age of the French Revolution.
What did British people in the late eighteenth century think and feel about their relationship to nonhuman animals? This book shows how an appreciation of human-animal similarity and a literature of compassion for animals developed in the same years during which radical thinkers were first basing political demands on the concept of natural and universal human rights. Some people began to conceptualise animal rights as an extension of the rights of man and woman. But
because oppressed people had to insist on their own separation from animals in order to claim the right to a full share in human privileges, the relationship between human and animal rights was
fraught and complex. This book examines that relationship in chapters covering the abolition movement, early feminism, and the political reform movement. Donkeys, pigs, apes and many other literary animals became central metaphors within political discourse, fought over in the struggle for rights and freedoms; while at the same time more and more writers became interested in exploring the experiences of animals themselves. We learn how children's writers pioneered
narrative techniques for representing animal subjectivity, and how the anti-cruelty campaign of the early 1800s drew on the legacy of 1790s radicalism. Coleridge, Wordsworth, Clare, Southey, Blake,
Wollstonecraft, Equiano, Dorothy Kilner, Thomas Spence, Mary Hays, Ignatius Sancho, Anna Letitia Barbauld, John Oswald, John Lawrence, and Thomas Erskine are just a few of the writers considered. Along with other canonical and non-canonical writers of many disciplines, they placed nonhuman animals at the heart of British literature in the age of the French Revolution.
1: Introduction: Human and animal rights in the eighteenth
century
2: Making an ass of yourself in narrative
3: The innovative animals of children's fiction
4: Woman and brute in feminism
5: The orang outing system: animals and abolition
6: Learned pigs: animals and the rights of man
7: The rights of beasts in the early nineteenth century
Conclusion: Rights and stories
After gaining her BA from Hull and her D.Phil from the University
of Oxford, Jane Spencer was an English lecturer for three years in
Edinburgh. In 1988 she moved to the University of Exeter, where she
is Professor of English. Her current research interests are in
animal representation and human-animal relations in the 1660-1830
period. Her books include The Rise of the Woman Novelist (1986),
Aphra Behn's Afterlife (2000) and Literary
Relations: Kinship and the Canon (2005). With Karen Edwards and
Derek Ryan, she is co-editor of Reading Literary Animals: Medieval
to Modern (Routledge, 2019).
There is much to admire in Jane Spencer's wide-ranging study. The
breadth of reference is impressive and takes in great swathes of
late eighteenth-century writing.
*Julie Murray, Eighteenth-Century Fiction *
Clearly written, meticulously researched, and illustrated with
intriguing artifacts from popular culture, the volume is an
outstanding contribution to both literary studies and animal
studies.
*R. D. Morrison, CHOICE*
Writing About Animals in the Age of Revolution remains an
important, well-written and richly researched work, which succeeds
brilliantly in showing â to expert readers and non-specialists
alike â the relevance of current research on animals and animality
between 18th and 19th centuries, going beyond the â¯disciplinary
boundaries between the history of literature, political history and
the history of "human sciences" and knowledge about nature.
*Francesca Antonelli, Clio, Women, Gender, History *
Jane Spencer's splendid book represents the result of decades of
work on approaches to animals in the eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries, and perhaps a lifetime of thought on this
subject.
*Christine Kenyon Jones, British Association of Romantic Studies*
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