Romantic Beasts

Pervasion, Eccentricity, Exhibition

Michael Demson and Christopher R. Clason (Eds.)

2025
239 pages
$49.95
ISBN 9781684485567
Transits

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.

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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-Century Literature

"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, 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

About the editors:

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.

Distributed by Rutgers University Press

Cloth: $150, 9781684485574; Ebook: $49.95, 9781684485581