Overview

By staging human-animal encounters, Romantic literature and art repeatedly questioned how ""human"" animals could be and how ""animal"" humans in fact are. Romantic-era authors and artists often depicted perplexing animal intrusions upon humans. Sometimes the intruders were mystifying or terrifying, like Coleridge’s albatross or Poe’s raven; sometimes they were mundane, as in “The Swallow” by Smith or “To a Mouse” by Burns-regardless, encounters with animal-others occasioned Romantic musings. This collection builds on existing scholarship while deploying new methodological approaches from gender studies, posthumanism, postcolonialism, disability studies, and digital studies to deepen our understanding of why animal-human encounters were so prevalent in the creative work and cultural discourse of the Romantic period, including the rhetoric of social movements like transatlantic abolitionism. Taken together, the chapters demonstrate the range and complexity of Romantic representations of human-animal interactions and conceptualizations of animality, nonhuman life, and not-wholly-human life.   Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

Full Product Details

Author:   Michael Demson ,  Christopher R. Clason ,  Alastair Hunt ,  Pamela Buck
Publisher:   Bucknell University Press,U.S.
Imprint:   Bucknell University Press,U.S.
Weight:   0.454kg
ISBN:  

9781684485574

ISBN 10:   1684485576
Pages:   224
Publication Date:   31 August 2025
Recommended Age:   From 16 to 99 years
Audience:   General/trade ,  College/higher education ,  Professional and scholarly ,  General ,  Tertiary & Higher Education
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   In Print  
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Table of Contents

Introduction Michael Demson and Christopher R. Clason Part One: The Pervasion of Animal Figures Chapter 1: Animals in Abolition Alastair Hunt Chapter 2: Imperial Animals and Aboriginal People: Collecting the South Pacific in Mary Ann Parker’s A Voyage Round the World Pamela Buck Chapter 3: The Politics of the Pig from Burke to Beckett John Gardner Part Two: The Eccentricity of Animal Figures Chapter 4: Familiarity and Flights of Imagination: Romantic Birds Jane Spencer Chapter 5: The Poodle’s Perspective in E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Lebensansichten des Katers Murr Christopher R. Clason Chapter 6: Weird Creatures: Romantic-era Zoophytes, The Great Chain of Being, and Posthumanist Life Allison Dushane Part Three: The Exhibition of Human-Animal Entanglements Chapter 7: The Monkey Artist and His Donkey Public: French Art-World Caricature, the Animal Menagerie, and the Digital Humanities Kathryn Desplanque Chapter 8: Horse Paintings: Problems of Communication and Politics in French Romantic Painting Peter Erickson Chapter 9: The Beasts of Romantic Melodrama Frederick Burwick Acknowledgments Bibliography Notes on Contributors Index

Reviews

""An excellent addition to the ever-expanding field of animal studies, Romantic Beasts invites consideration of non-human animals large and small, domesticated and wild, both familiar and exotic to the nineteenth-century European public. Here are animals on page and stage and in the plastic arts, real and allegorical, in chapters sure to stimulate wider explorations."" -- Glynis Ridley * coeditor of Robinson Crusoe after 300 Years * ""Romantic Beasts enriches our discussions of the other-than-human, reaching across prominent as well as popular works in English, German, and French Romanticism, and connecting animal studies with race, slavery, and imperialism. These new perspectives will shape our understanding of literary animals, and extend the lively current debates around posthumanist, environmentalist, and affective approaches."" -- Laura Brown * author of The Counterhuman Imaginary: Earthquakes, Lapdogs, and Traveling Coinage in Eighteenth-Cent * ""In its timely and authoritative discussion of animals in the context of Romanticism, this grouping of essays edited by Michael Demson and Christopher R. Clason offers a gap-filling understanding of an important locus of early nineteenth-century literary imagery. Informed by a wide array of texts, these studies are full of fascinating details and illuminating moments, all well-written and often corrective. Also a judicious compilation and integration of insights, this assemblage of studies also suggests, by implication, taking a new look at Romanticism itself. Romantic Beasts is a welcome contribution to literary history and criticism and a must-read for anyone interested in animalia and its cultural connections."" -- Larry H. Peer * editor of Transgressive Romanticism * ""By drawing on the diverse but complementary perspectives of Romanticism and animal studies, Romantic Beasts advances the study of both fields to a new international and interdisciplinary level. This innovative and exciting collection of wide-ranging scholarly essays, expertly curated and comprehensively introduced by the two editors, is a fitting tribute to the polymathic Romanticism expertise of Professor Burwick to whom this volume is dedicated."" -- Eugene Stelzig * author of The Romantic Subject in Autobiography: Rousseau and Goethe *

Author Information

MICHAEL DEMSON is a professor of English at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas.   CHRISTOPHER R. CLASON is a professor emeritus at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan.  

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