Awards

• Winner of Capture 2021

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9781517909635

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Capture is a major intervention in critical animal studies and an important rethinking of American culture during the period in which the romance of the frontier gave way to the routinized violence of settler biopower. Antoine Traisnel shows how the disappearance of animals generated a countermovement: new modes of representation-aesthetic, scientific, and political-dedicated to reproducing animal life as commodifiable vitality but also as fugitivity and finitude. This is a bracing prehistory of our contemporary situation haunted by both the industrial feedlot and the sixth mass extinction. -Tobias Menely, author of The Animal Claim: Sensibility and the Creaturely Voice Investigating figures such as Audubon, Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville, Antoine Traisnel brings extraordinary new insights into our understanding of how technology not only influences but often decides the artistic and philosophical understanding of animal life. Based on rich historical archives but also deeply theoretical, Capture persuasively argues that in the effort to bring to the fore what is unapproachable in the animal, nineteenth-century art redefined what or who counts as an animal and, in so doing, reinvented the human-animal relationship. -Branka Arsic, author of Bird Relics: Grief and Vitalism in Thoreau

Capture is a major intervention in critical animal studies and an important rethinking of American culture during the period in which the romance of the frontier gave way to the routinized violence of settler biopower. Antoine Traisnel shows how the disappearance of animals generated a countermovement: new modes of representation-aesthetic, scientific, and political-dedicated to reproducing animal life as commodifiable vitality but also as fugitivity and finitude. This is a bracing prehistory of our contemporary situation haunted by both the industrial feedlot and the sixth mass extinction. -Tobias Menely, author of The Animal Claim: Sensibility and the Creaturely Voice Investigating figures such as Audubon, Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville, Antoine Traisnel brings extraordinary new insights into our understanding of how technology not only influences but often decides the artistic and philosophical understanding of animal life. Based on rich historical archives but also deeply theoretical, Capture persuasively argues that in the effort to bring to the fore what is unapproachable in the animal, nineteenth-century art redefined what or who counts as an animal and, in so doing, reinvented the human-animal relationship. -Branka Arsic, author of Bird Relics: Grief and Vitalism in Thoreau Capture offers a thought-provoking tour through the ways human-animal relations were reimagined in nineteenth-century America. -ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment Capture: American Pursuits and the Making of a New Animal Condition is striking and, one is tempted to say, captivating...a deep, intelligent and well-written study. -Transatlantica A fascinating genealogy of the representations of nonhuman animals that emerged in the United States during the nineteenth century. -Textual Practice

Author Information

Antoine Traisnel is assistant professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Michigan. He is author of Hawthorne: Blasted Allegories and coauthor of Donner le change: L'impense animal.

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