Romantic Beasts (Paperback)

Michael Demson

ISBN 10: 1684485568 / ISBN 13: 9781684485567

Published by Bucknell University Press,U.S., New Brunswick, NJ, 2025

About this Item

Paperback. 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 Coleridges albatross or Poes 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. Building on two decades of scholarship, this collection presents a wide array of current scholarly projects on the intersection of Romanticism and animal studies, renewing the call for more exploration of how the figure of the animal pervades Romantic texts during the age of revolutions. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.

Seller Inventory # 9781684485567

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Romantic Beasts (Paperback)
• Publisher: Bucknell University Press,U.S., New Brunswick, NJ
• Publication Date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1684485568
• ISBN 13: 9781684485567
• Binding: Paperback
• Condition: new

About this title

Synopsis

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.

About the Author

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.