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Shakespeare wrote of lions, shrews, horned toads, curs, mastiffs, and hellhounds, but the word “animal” itself only appears very rarely in his work, which was in keeping with sixteenth-century usage. As this book reveals, the modern human/animal divide first came strongly into play in the seventeenth century, with Descartes’ famous formulation that reason sets humans above other species: “I think, therefore I am.” Before that moment, animals could claim a firmer place alongside humans in a larger vision of belonging, or what the author terms cosmopolity. With Shakespeare as her touchstone, the author explores the creaturely dispensation that existed until Descartes. She finds that early modern writers used classical natural history and readings of Genesis to credit animals with various kinds of stakeholdership, prerogative, and entitlement, employing the language of politics in a constitutional vision of cosmic membership. Using this political idiom to frame cross-species relations, the author argues, carried with it the notion that animals possess their own investments in the world, a point distinct from the question of whether animals have reason. It also enabled a sharp critique of the tyranny of humankind. By answering “the question of the animal” historically, the book contributes to cross-disciplinary debates engaging animal studies, political theory, intellectual history, and literary studies.

In this book, the author enlists her readers in pursuit of the elusive concept of atmosphere in literary works. She shows how diverse conceptions of air in the eighteenth century converged in British fiction, producing the modern literary sense of atmosphere and moving novelists to explore the threshold between material and immaterial worlds. The book links the emergence of literary atmosphere to changing ideas about air and the earth’s atmosphere in natural philosophy, as well as to the era’s theories of the supernatural and fascination with social manners—or, as they are now known, “airs.” The author thus offers a new interpretation of several standard features of the Enlightenment—the scientific revolution, the decline of magic, character-based sociability, and the rise of the novel—which considers them in terms of the romance of air that permeates and connects them. As it explores key episodes in the history of natural philosophy and in major literary works such as Paradise Lost, “The Rape of the Lock,” Robinson Crusoe, and The Mysteries of Udolpho, the book promises to change the atmosphere of eighteenth-century studies and the history of the novel.

Alain L. Locke (1886–1954), in his famous 1925 anthology The New Negro, declared that “the pulse of the Negro world has begun to beat in Harlem.” Often called the father of the Harlem Renaissance, he had his finger directly on that pulse, promoting, influencing, and sparring with such figures as Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Jacob Lawrence, Richmond Barthé, William Grant Still, Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, Ralph Bunche, and John Dewey. This biography of an extraordinarily gifted philosopher and writer narrates the story of Locke's impact on twentieth-century America's cultural and intellectual life. It traces this story through Locke's Philadelphia upbringing, his undergraduate years at Harvard University—where William James helped spark his influential engagement with pragmatism—and his tenure as the first African American Rhodes Scholar. The heart of the narrative illuminates Locke's heady years in 1920s New York City and his forty-year career at Howard University, where he helped spearhead the adult education movement of the 1930s and wrote on topics ranging from the philosophy of value to the theory of democracy. The book shows that throughout this illustrious career—despite a formal manner that many observers interpreted as elitist or distant—Locke remained a warm and effective teacher and mentor, as well as a fierce champion of literature and art as means of breaking down barriers between communities. The multifaceted portrait that emerges from this account effectively reclaims Locke's place in the pantheon of America's most important minds.

This book charts the phenomenon of the love of Britain that emerged after the Revolution and remains in the character of U.S. society and class, the style of academic life, and the idea of American intellectualism. But as the author shows, this Anglophilia was more than just an elite nostalgia; it was popular devotion that made reverence for British tradition instrumental to the psychological innovations of democracy. Anglophilia spoke to fantasies of cultural belonging, polite sociability, and, finally, deference itself as an affective practice within egalitarian politics. The author traces the wide-ranging effects of Anglophilia on American literature, art, and intellectual life in the early nineteenth century, as well as its influence in arguments against slavery, in the politics of Union, and in the dialectics of liberty and loyalty before the Civil War. By working beyond narratives of British influence, the author highlights a more intricate culture of American response, one that included Whig elites, college students, radical democrats, urban immigrants, and African Americans. Ultimately, the book argues that the love of Britain was not simply a fetish or form of shame—a release from the burdens of American culture—but an anachronistic structure of attachment in which U.S. identity was lived in other languages of national expression.

Some of the perplexities of animal rights, as a historical phenomenon, are resolved if we regard rights as neither simply intrinsic to nature nor contingent on state recognition but as a communicative transaction, a claim (etymologically, a cry) that begins before the law and yet is only realized in the law. Testing this premise, this book tracks the development of ethicopolitical community with animals in Britain from the anti-Cartesian origins of ethical sensibility in the Restoration to the first animal welfare legislation, Martin’s Act of 1822. As a semiology of creaturely affect and address, sensibility offered an unprecedented account of the non-linguistic communication humans share with other animals, of the force of the signifying voice to intervene or interpose and of its availability to redirection and remediation. The book moves from accounts of community formation in Enlightenment political philosophy, to public address in periodical culture, to poetry as a medium of advocacy, to parliamentary debates about the statutory protection of animal welfare. At stake in each of these arenas is the status of an intermediary, such as an advocate who establishes his authority to intervene in the sovereign order by staging his secondariness vis-à-vis a passionate voice that precedes him. The book recovers a discourse of sensibility in which the human appears, in the self-difference of a creature subject to history’s impress, in its answerability to the animal, and argues that the non-identity between the vocal claim and the symbolic law preserves the possibility of a justice not yet realized.

This book explores the imaginative identification with animals enabled by aggression and the narcissistic aversion from them manifested as destructiveness. It explores the attraction to the society of other animals that finds expression in stories about human beings who try to join them, and the affects that cluster around the possibility that the human body is susceptible in various ways to becoming animal. The book looks at two different kinds of attempt to imagine the removal of the boundary separating human beings from other animals. A discussion is presented of the correlation between articulate utterance and social complexity in Aristotle's zoological and political works, which leaves open the possibility that birds may be capable of a degree of political organization comparable to that of human beings. The book contrasts Aristotle's curiosity about the social lives of other animals with Aristophanes' Birds, Herman Melville's Moby Dick, and Louis-Ferdinand Céline's Rigadoon, in all of which isolated individuals who have fallen out of human society experience some form of fascination with the social groups of animals they discover beyond its confines.

This book examines contemporary notions of humanism and ethics by reconstructing a little-known but crucial underground tradition of theorizing the animal from Wittgenstein, Cavell, and Lyotard to Lévinas, Derrida, Maturana, and Varela. Through detailed readings of how discourses of race, sexuality, colonialism, and animality interact in twentieth-century American culture, the author explores what it means, in theory and critical practice, to take seriously “the question of the animal.”

This book explores the relations between humans and other animals as they appear to a reader of medieval bestiaries, given that almost all of them are realized as parchment books and that parchment, although made from animal skin, looks much like human skin. Using Didier Anzieu’s concept of the Skin Ego and a theory of reading as assuming a second skin, the book explores how a supposedly human identity can be challenged by a reading process that inserts the reader into an animal skin. It examines the treatment of bestiary creatures in relation to the pages on which their entries are copied, showing how bestiarists’ teachings may be confirmed or undermined by the interaction between a text’s content, which is often focused on animals’ skins, their illustrations, which often outline or highlight those skins, and its material support, an actual instance of skin. The pages of many different manuscripts, transmitting numerous bestiary versions, are read closely in order to bring out possible interconnections between word, image, and parchment. Each chapter addresses an aspect of human-animal relations that is thematized both by medieval bestiaries and by modern theorists of the posthuman such as Giorgio Agamben and Jacques Derrida. In-depth coverage of Latin and French bestiary versions produces a new overall account of the development of the Physiologus tradition in Western Europe, one which attributes more importance to Continental traditions than previous Anglophone scholarship.

This book offers a fundamental reconception of the person generally assumed to be the first woman writer in French, the author known as Marie de France. It considers all of the writing ascribed to Marie, including her famous Lais, her 103 animal fables, and the earliest vernacular Saint Patrick's Purgatory. Evidence about Marie de France's life is so meager that we know next to nothing about her—not where she was born and to what rank, who her parents were, whether she was married or single, where she lived and might have traveled, whether she dwelled in cloister or at court, nor whether in England or France. In the face of this great writer's near anonymity, scholars have assumed her to be a simple, naive, and modest Christian figure. This book's claim, in contrast, is that Marie is among the most self-conscious, sophisticated, complicated, and disturbing figures of her time—the Joyce of the twelfth century. At a moment of great historical turning, the so-called Renaissance of the twelfth century, Marie was both a disrupter of prevailing cultural values and a founder of new ones. Her works, it is argued, reveal an author obsessed by writing, by memory, and by translation, and acutely aware not only of her role in the preservation of cultural memory, but of the transforming psychological, social, and political effects of writing within an oral tradition. Marie's intervention lies in her obsession with the performative capacities of literature.

Federico García Lorca (1898–1936) had enormous impact on the generation of American poets who came of age during the cold war, from Robert Duncan and Allen Ginsberg to Robert Creeley and Jerome Rothenberg. In large numbers, these poets have not only translated his works, but written imitations, parodies, and pastiches—along with essays and critical reviews. This book is an exploration of the afterlife of this legendary Spanish writer in the poetic culture of the United States. It examines how Lorca in English translation has become a specifically American poet, adapted to American cultural and ideological desiderata—one that bears little resemblance to the original corpus, or even to Lorca's Spanish legacy. As the author assesses Lorca's considerable influence on the American literary scene of the latter half of the twentieth century, he uncovers fundamental truths about contemporary poetry, the uses and abuses of translation, and Lorca himself.

During her lifetime, the gifted writer Marie le Jars de Gournay (1565–1645) was celebrated as one of the “seventy most famous women of all time” in Jean de la Forge's Circle of Learned Women (1663). The adopted daughter of Michel de Montaigne, as well as his editor, she was a major literary force and a pioneering feminist voice during a tumultuous period in France. This volume presents translations of four of Gournay's works that address feminist issues. Two of these appear here in English for the first time: The Promenade of Monsieur de Montaigne and The Apology for the Woman Writing. One of the first modern psychological novels, the best-selling Promenade was also the first to explore female sexual feeling. With the autobiographical Apology, Gournay defended every aspect of her life, from her moral conduct to her household management. The book also includes her last revisions (1641) of her two best-known feminist treatises: The Equality of Men and Women and The Ladies' Complaint. The editors provide a general overview of Gournay's career, as well as individual introductions and extensive annotations for each work.

In the middle of the eighteenth century, something new made itself felt in European culture—a tone or style that came to be called the sentimental. The sentimental mode went on to shape not just literature, art, music, and cinema, but people's very structures of feeling, their ways of doing and being. This book challenges Sergei Eisenstein's influential account of Dickens and early American film by tracing the unexpected history and intricate strategies of the sentimental mode and showing how it has been reimagined over the past three centuries. It begins with a look at Frank Capra and the Capraesque in American public life, and then digs back to the eighteenth century to examine the sentimental substratum underlying Dickens and early cinema alike. With this surprising move, the author reveals how literary spectatorship in the eighteenth century anticipated classic Hollywood films such as Capra's It Happened One Night, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, and It's a Wonderful Life. He then moves forward to romanticism and modernism—two cultural movements often seen as defined by their rejection of the sentimental—examining how authors like Mary Shelley, Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf actually engaged with sentimental forms and themes in ways that left a mark on their work. Reaching from Laurence Sterne to the Coen brothers, the book casts new light on the long eighteenth century, and on the novelistic forebears of cinema and our modern world.

This book argues that the problem of how to designate death produces a long tradition of literature about dying in Old and Middle English, a literature that intensively and self-reflexively imagines how the very terms of literature might solve the problem of the termination of life. The book ranges between close readings of literature’s attempts to imagine a relation with death in major poets like Geoffrey Chaucer and the Pearl­­ poet, and philosophical attempts to designate death despite its impossibility: the relation between finitude and form. The book also explores the relation between crypt and archive, the philosophy of language and logic, and contemporary theorizing about death and dying, from Martin Heidegger to Maurice Blanchot and Gillian Rose.

Maverick gay poetic icon Thom Gunn (1929–2004) and his body of work have long dared the British and American poetry establishments either to claim or disavow him. To critics in the UK and US alike, he demonstrated that formal poetry could successfully include new speech rhythms and open forms, and that experimental styles could still maintain technical and intellectual rigor. Along the way, Gunn's verse captured the social upheavals of the 1960s, the existential possibilities of the late twentieth century, and the tumult of post-Stonewall gay culture. This book surveys Gunn's career from his youth in 1930s Britain to his final years in California, from his earliest publications to his later unpublished notebooks, bringing together some of the most important poet-critics from both sides of the Atlantic to assess his oeuvre. It traces how Gunn, in both his life and his writings, pushed at boundaries of different kinds, be they geographic, sexual, or poetic.

This book offers an institutional and cultural history of books, the book trade, and the bibliographic ego. The author traces the emergence of possessive authorship from the establishment of a printing industry in England to the passage of the 1710 Statute of Anne, which provided the legal underpinnings for modern copyright. Along the way he demonstrates that the culture of books, including the idea of the author, is intimately tied to the practical trade of publishing those books. As the author shows, copyright is a form of monopoly that developed alongside a range of related protections such as commercial trusts, manufacturing patents, and censorship, and cannot be understood apart from them. The regulation of the press pitted competing interests and rival monopolistic structures against one another—guildmembers and nonprofessionals, printers and booksellers, authors and publishers. These struggles, in turn, crucially shaped the literary and intellectual practices of early modern authors, as well as early capitalist economic organization.

The photographer and reformer Jacob Riis once wrote, “I have seen an armful of daisies keep the peace of a block better than a policeman and his club.” Riis was not alone in his belief that beauty could tame urban chaos, but are aesthetic experiences always a social good? Could aesthetics also inspire violent crime, working-class unrest, and racial murder? To answer these questions, this book turns to those who debated claims that art could democratize culture—civic reformers, anarchists, novelists, civil rights activists, and college professors—to reveal that beauty provides unexpected occasions for radical, even revolutionary, political thinking. It explores the intersection of beauty and violence by examining university lectures and course materials on aesthetics from a century ago along with riots, acts of domestic terrorism, magic lantern exhibitions, and other public spectacles. Philosophical aesthetics, realist novels, urban photography, and black periodicals, the book argues, inspired and instigated all sorts of collective social endeavors, from the progressive nature of tenement reform to the horrors of lynching. Discussing Jane Addams, W. E. B. Du Bois, Charlie Chaplin, William Dean Howells, and Riis as aesthetic theorists in the company of Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Schiller, the book ultimately suggests that the distance separating academic thinking and popular wisdom about social transformation is narrower than is generally assumed.

Modern theory needs a history lesson. Neither Marx nor Nietzsche first gave us theory. Hegel did. To support this contention, The Birth of Theory presents a refreshingly clear and lively account of the origins and legacy of Hegel’s dialectic as theory. It begins with the untold story about Hegel, who boldly broke from modern philosophy when he adopted medieval dialectical habits of thought to fashion his dialectic. While his contemporaries rejected premodern dialectic as outdated dogma, Hegel embraced both its emphasis on language as thought and its fascination with the categories of identity and difference, creating what we now recognize as theory as distinct from systematic philosophy. Not content merely to change philosophy, Hegel also used this dialectic to expose the persistent archaism of modern life itself, establishing a method of social analysis that has influenced everyone from Marx and the nineteenth-century Hegelians, to Nietzsche and Bakhtin, all the way to Deleuze and Jameson. By uncovering these theoretical filiations across time, The Birth of Theory will not only change the way we read Hegel, but also the way we think about the histories of theory. With chapters that reanimate the overly familiar topics of ideology, commodity fetishism, and political economy, along with a powerful reinterpretation of Hegel’s famous master/slave dialectic, The Birth of Theory places the disciplines of philosophy, literature, and history in conversation with one another in an unprecedented way. Daring to reconcile the sworn enemies of Hegelianism and Deleuzianism, this timely book revitalizes dialectics for the twenty-first century.

Bleak Liberalism advances a renewed account of liberalism, with the aim of providing a better understanding of the way liberal concepts, principles, and aspirations have informed novelistic art of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Britain and the US. From the writings of John Stuart Mill through the debates of the cold war and beyond, liberalism is a philosophical and political project conceived in an acute awareness of the challenges and often bleak prospects confronting it. These challenges are shown to be various, encompassing a range of psychological, sociological, and economic conditions. This renewed account of liberalism forms the basis for literary analyses focused on the interplay of political themes and elements of literary form, including narrative, dialogue, character, and perspective. The study includes analyses of canonical works of high realism (Dicken’s Bleak House, Eliot’s Middlemarch, and Trollope’s The Way We Live Now), political novels (Dickens’s Hard Times, Gaskell’s North and South, Forster’s Howards End, Trilling’s The Middle of the Journey), and experimental works of modernism (Ellison’s Invisible Man, Lessing’s The Golden Notebook) that dramatize the ideological conflicts of the twentieth century in striking ways. A central role is played in this study by the liberalism of the war and cold war era, and especially the work of Lionel Trilling, given the vivid debates during this era about the role of art in the face of challenging experiences of political disenchantment and renewed aspiration. The impact of neoliberalism on theories of liberalism is also discussed.

In this book, the author confronts her resistance to The Merchant of Venice as both a critic and a Jew. With a distinctive psychological acumen, this book argues that William Shakespeare's play frames the uneasy relationship between Christians and Jews specifically in familial terms in order to recapitulate the vexed familial relationship between Christianity and Judaism. The book locates the promise—or threat—of Jewish conversion as a particular site of tension in the play. Drawing on a variety of cultural materials, it demonstrates that, despite the triumph of its Christians, The Merchant of Venice reflects Christian anxiety and guilt about its simultaneous dependence on and disavowal of Judaism. In this psycho-theological analysis, both the insistence that Shylock's daughter Jessica remain racially bound to her father after her conversion and the depiction of Shylock as a bloody-minded monster are understood as antidotes to Christian uneasiness about a Judaism it can neither own nor disown. In taking seriously the religious discourse of The Merchant of Venice, the book offers a book both on the play itself and on the question of Jews and Judaism in Renaissance England and beyond.

In Robert Bresson’s cinematography the linkage of fragmented, heterogeneous images challenges our assumption that we know what things are, or the infinite ways persons, animals, and material objects can be attuned or entangled. In Bresson’s films, an aesthetic principle thus becomes an ethical instrument to carve out an ontology in which the truth of categorical fixities is menaced. The Bond of the Furthest Apart argues that Bresson’s visionary rethinkings run parallel to suppositions about individuality, ontology, and the demystification of human privilege in the philosophical fiction of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Kafka. The bond of the book’s title refers to the counterpoint and antinomy within particular works and beneath the strains of these literary and cinematic works which are kindred in their revelation of things that lure us toward them in the absence of an orienting perspective that would make what is seen precisely recognizable.