ABSTRACT
Anti-cruelty arguments are treated explicitly in the works of William Cowper, William Wordsworth, S. T. Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Lord Byron. Cowper's emphasis on the sentience and individuality of animals is characteristic of the emerging discourse of animal rights in the eighteenth century. Cowper attempts to represent animals as individuals in several of his works. Reading Austen in the context of Cowper and the Romantic writers allows one to recognize her participation in the rural sport controversy. The comparison to Cowper and the Romantics also makes visible Austen's feminist development of the anti-sport argument. Austen shifts the focus to female subordination in the sexual game. For example, in Mansfield Park, Henry Crawford sadistically speaks of "making a small hole in Fanny Price's heart". Austen pointedly associates the sportsman's so-called virility with cruelty. The structural parallels between the positions of women and animals struck Austen at an early age.
