ABSTRACT

The scientific, political, and industrial revolutions of the Romantic period transformed the status of humans and redefined the concept of species. This book examines literary representations of human and non-human animality in British Romanticism. The book’s novel approach focuses on the role of aesthetic taste in the Romantic understanding of the animal. Concentrating on the discourses of the sublime, the beautiful, and the ugly, Heymans argues that the Romantics’ aesthetic views of animality influenced—and were influenced by—their moral, scientific, political, and theological judgment. The study reveals how feelings of environmental alienation and disgust played a positive moral role in animal rights poetry, why ugliness presented such a major problem for Romantic-period scientists and theologians, and how, in political writings, the violent yet awe-inspiring power of exotic species came to symbolize the beauty and terror of the French Revolution.

Linking the works of Wordsworth, Blake, Coleridge, Byron, the Shelleys, Erasmus Darwin, and William Paley to the theories of Immanuel Kant and Edmund Burke, this book brings an original perspective to the fields of ecocriticism, animal studies, and literature and science studies.

chapter |15 pages

Introduction

The Aesthetics of Species

part |63 pages

Part I

chapter |22 pages

1 The Environmental Ethics of Alienation

The Ecological Sublime

chapter |20 pages

2 Green Masochism

Coleridge's “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”

chapter |19 pages

3 Hunting for Pleasure

Wordsworth's Ecofeminism

part |53 pages

Part II

chapter |18 pages

4 Humans and Other Moving Things

Wordsworth Visits London (with Deleuze and Guattari)

chapter |17 pages

5 The Cute and the Cruel

Taste, Animality and Sexual Violence in Burke and Blake

chapter |16 pages

6 A Problem of Waste Management

Frankenstein and the Visual Order of Things

part |49 pages

Part III

chapter |17 pages

7 Revelation, Reason, Ridicule

The Scientific Sublime

chapter |15 pages

8 A Taste of God

Natural Theology and the Aesthetics of Intelligent Design

chapter |15 pages

9 Beauty with a Past

Evolutionary Aesthetics in Erasmus Darwin's The Temple of Nature