ABSTRACT

This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book traces the presence of animals from rupture through reconciliation, following the trajectory from life into memory as it is graphed onto the bodies of animals in Romantic literature. It begins with close readings of key texts and attends to linguistic inadequacies that surround encounters with beasts. The book considers the sense of loss and melancholia that characterizes Clare's animal philosophy and theology in his early poetry. The metaphor lending its name to this introduction, exhuming beasts, calls for a reexamination of the non-human animals present during the Romantic period. Early nineteenth-century British literature is overpopulated with images of dead and deadly animals. These images paradoxically both obscure and expose moments and practices of rupture that shape concepts of what constitutes the human, what constitutes life, and what differentiates human and non-human animals.