Petkeeping in nineteenth-century Paris.

Kathleen Kete's wise and witty examination of petkeeping in nineteenth-century Paris provides a unique window through which to view the lives of ordinary French people. She demonstrates how that cliché of modern life, the family dog, reveals the tensions that modernity created for the Parisian bourgeoisie.Kete's study draws on a range of literary and archival sources, from dog-care books to veterinarians's records to Dumas's musings on his cat. The fad for aquariums, attitudes toward vivisection, the dread of rabies, the development of dog breeding - all are shown to reflect the ways middle-class people thought about their lives. Petkeeping, says Kete, was a way to imagine a better, more manageable version of the world - it relieved the pressures of contemporary life and improvised solutions to the intractable mesh that was post-Enlightenment France. The faithful, affectionate family dog became a counterpoint to the isolation of individualism and lack of community in urban life. By century's end, however, animals no longer represented the human condition with such potency, and even the irascible, autonomous cat had been rehabilitated into a creature of fidelity and affection.Full of fascinating details, this innovative book will contribute to the way we understand culture and the creation of class

Consuming China: Imperial Trade and Global Exchange in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park

In the late eighteenth century, Britain attempted to expand trade with China and satisfy the demand for Eastern luxuries at home. This essay examines how Jane Austen’s novel Mansfield Park uses global trade with China to criticize a British class system rooted in imperialism. Austen’s novel presents a story of domestic trade as Fanny Price negotiates with her wealthy relatives the Bertrams by means of the exchange of Eastern commodities and transforms their imperial worldview through her creation of a global network at Mansfield Park. By examining how the British consume China, Austen provides a new conception of middle-class identity based on meritocracy and upward mobility. She further comments upon Britain’s involvement in the East by encouraging successful diplomacy through international connection. Situating the novel within a global framework enlarges previous postcolonial readings of her work and redefines her as a worldly writer