The Rise of Animals and Descent of Man, 1660–1800

Toward Posthumanism in British Literature between Descartes and Darwin

John Morillo

The Rise of Animals and the Descent of Man illuminates compelling historical connections between a current fascination with animal life and the promotion of the moral status of non-human animals as ethical subjects deserving our attention and respect, and a deep interest in the animal as agent in eighteenth-century literate culture. It explores how writers, including well-known poets, important authors who mixed art and science, and largely forgotten writers of sermons and children’s stories all offered innovative alternatives to conventional narratives about the meaning of animals in early modern Europe. They question Descartes’ claim that animals are essentially soulless machines incapable of thought or feelings. British writers from 1660-1800 remain informed by Cartesianism, but often counter it by recognizing that feelings are as important as reason when it comes to defining animal life and its relation to human life. This British line of thought deviates from Descartes by focusing on fine feeling as a register of moral life empowered by sensibility and sympathy, but this very stance is complicated by cultural fears that too much kindness to animals can entail too much kinship with them—fears made famous in the later reaction to Darwinian evolution. The Riseof Animals uncovers ideological tensions between sympathy for animals and a need to defend the special status of humans from the rapidly developing Darwinian perspective. The writers it examines engage in complex negotiations with sensibility and a wide range of philosophical and theological traditions. Their work anticipates posthumanist thought and the challenges it poses to traditional humanist values within the humanities and beyond. The Rise of Animals is a sophisticated intellectual history of the origins of our changing attitudes about animals that at the same time illuminates major currents of eighteenth-century British literary culture.

University Press Copublishing Division / University of Delaware Press

Pages: 264 • Trim: 6¼ x 9½

978-1-61149-673-4 • Hardback • November 2017 • $117.00 • (£90.00)

978-1-61149-674-1 • eBook • November 2017 • $111.00 • (£85.00)

Subjects: Literary Criticism / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh, Literary Criticism / Modern / 18th Century, Literary Criticism / Subjects & Themes / Religion

The Rise of Animals and Descent of Man, 1660–1800

Toward Posthumanism in British Literature between Descartes and Darwin

Hardback

eBook

Summary

The Rise of Animals and the Descent of Man illuminates compelling historical connections between a current fascination with animal life and the promotion of the moral status of non-human animals as ethical subjects deserving our attention and respect, and a deep interest in the animal as agent in eighteenth-century literate culture. It explores how writers, including well-known poets, important authors who mixed art and science, and largely forgotten writers of sermons and children’s stories all offered innovative alternatives to conventional narratives about the meaning of animals in early modern Europe. They question Descartes’ claim that animals are essentially soulless machines incapable of thought or feelings. British writers from 1660-1800 remain informed by Cartesianism, but often counter it by recognizing that feelings are as important as reason when it comes to defining animal life and its relation to human life. This British line of thought deviates from Descartes by focusing on fine feeling as a register of moral life empowered by sensibility and sympathy, but this very stance is complicated by cultural fears that too much kindness to animals can entail too much kinship with them—fears made famous in the later reaction to Darwinian evolution. The Riseof Animals uncovers ideological tensions between sympathy for animals and a need to defend the special status of humans from the rapidly developing Darwinian perspective. The writers it examines engage in complex negotiations with sensibility and a wide range of philosophical and theological traditions. Their work anticipates posthumanist thought and the challenges it poses to traditional humanist values within the humanities and beyond. The Rise of Animals is a sophisticated intellectual history of the origins of our changing attitudes about animals that at the same time illuminates major currents of eighteenth-century British literary culture.

Details

University Press Copublishing Division / University of Delaware Press

Pages: 264 • Trim: 6¼ x 9½

978-1-61149-673-4 • Hardback • November 2017 • $117.00 • (£90.00)

978-1-61149-674-1 • eBook • November 2017 • $111.00 • (£85.00)

Subjects: Literary Criticism / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh, Literary Criticism / Modern / 18th Century, Literary Criticism / Subjects & Themes / Religion

Author

John Morillo is associate professor of English at North Carolina State University.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction: British Animal Discourse between Cartesian and Darwinian Bookends
Chapter One: On the Posthuman Character of Cavendish’s Fantastic Hyphenated Creatures
Chapter Two: Cultured Children and the Natural World: Problems with Animal Sympathy in Lessons for the Rising Generation of Readers, 1730-1800
Chapter Three: Anglican Clerics and Animal Clemency, 1675-1792
Chapter Four: Cowper’s Creatures: The Orpheus of Olney and His “Symptoms of Either Sex”
Chapter Five: The Other Darwin: Posthumanism’s Dignified Pantomime, Eleusinian Mysteries of Evolution, and the Descent of Man in Erasmus Darwin’s Temple of Nature
Bibliography
About the Author

Reviews

Morillo’s volume represents an important step forward in the rapidly growing interdisciplinary field of animal studies. Also author of Uneasy Feelings: Literature, the Passions, and Class from Neoclassicism to Romanticism (2001), Morillo (English, North Carolina State Univ.) describes how various writers from the Restoration through the long 18th century used a range of forms—from fiction and poetry, to sermons and other clerical writings, to children’s literature and natural history—to refute Descartes’s view of animals as soulless automatons, in so doing anticipating a post-humanist position in many respects. The range and breadth of the texts under discussion make this volume a useful complement to other recent critical work in this field, such as Heather Keenleyside’s excellent Animals and Other People: Literary Forms and Living Beings in the Long Eighteenth Century (CH, Jun'17, 54-4611), which focuses more squarely on canonical literature. Particularly impressive is Morillo’s treatment of William Cowper’s The Task (1785) and Erasmus Darwin’s epic poem The Temple of Nature (1803). The book is challenging, but Morillo’s clear prose and helpful analysis of the philosophical and critical contexts serve the subject well.

Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.
— Choice Reviews