Romantic beasts : pervasion, eccentricity, exhibition /
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 mystifyi...
| Other Authors: | , |
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| Format: | Book |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Lewisburg, Pennsylvania :
Bucknell University Press,
[2025].
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| Series: | Colección Trà nsits.
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| Subjects: |
| Summary: | 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, non-human life and not-wholly-human life. |
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| Physical Description: | viii, 228 pages : illustrations (some color) ; 25 cm. |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references (pages 203-220) and index. |
| ISBN: | 9781684485567 1684485568 9781684485574 1684485576 |