Cultivated Sympathies: Human Sentiments and Animal Subjects in the Long Eighteenth Century

Thesis (PhD) - Indiana University, English, 2006This study examines the interlinked histories of sentimentalism and animal advocacy in the period stretching from the Restoration to Romanticism. Portraying Britain's culture of sentiment as the context for unprecedented public articulations of concern for nonhumans, it historicizes the logic of feeling that characterizes sympathy as disturbingly sentimental when its recipient is an animal. The story I tell has been previously overlooked due to the prevailing critical rejection of sentimentality's emotionalism, literalism, and didacticism. My project contributes to sentimentalism's current rehabilitation by attending to the political reach of its pathos, analyzing the models of feeling that shaped its reception, and suggesting that literary didacticism and animal subjectivity remain under-explored aesthetic problems. Drawing on natural history, periodicals, and classical precursors including Virgil and Cicero, I examine the self-consciously activist literature that brought humans into sympathetic proximity with beasts, and I trace how sentimental animal advocacy came to be associated with middle-class politeness, national progress, and political radicalism. Chapter One describes how Lord Shaftesbury's moral philosophy undermines traditional justifications for human sovereignty and conceives of a "public" defined by emotional norms. Chapter Two addresses depictions of genteel sport hunting in georgic poems by John Gay, Alexander Pope, James Thomson, and William Somerville, arguing that the georgic's emotional didacticism and naturalistic attention to animal affect make it more suitable for a critique than a defense of rural blood sports. Chapter Three considers how Laurence Sterne, Anna Barbauld, and William Cowper supplement sentimental forms of persuasion with other models of ethical obligation, and describes the way these writers anticipate animal-rights discourse when they apply a pervasive language of liberty to animal subjectivity. To conclude, I pursue sentimental pathos into early parliamentary debates about animal welfare legislation. While this project focuses on the origins of animal advocacy, I am equally interested in sentimentalism as a model for the literary production of communal identification. My aim is to consider how a language of moral sentiment operated in, and to some extent constituted, eighteenth-century civil society. More generally, I suggest that sentimental humanitarianism comprises a significant and telling chapter in the history of social concern

British Romanticism and the Global Climate

As a result of developments in the meteorological and geological sciences, the Romantic period saw the gradual emergence of attempts to understand the climate as a dynamic global system that could potentially be affected by human activity. This chapter examines textual responses to climate disruption cause by the Laki eruption of 1783 and the Tambora eruption of 1815. During the Laki haze, writers such as Horace Walpole, Gilbert White, and William Cowper found in Milton a powerful way of understanding the entanglements of culture and climate at a time of national and global crisis. Apocalyptic discourse continued to resonate during the Tambora crisis, as is evident in eyewitness accounts of the eruption, in the utopian predictions of John Barrow and Eleanor Anne Porden, and in the grim speculations of Byron’s ‘Darkness’. Romantic writing offers a powerful analogue for thinking about climate change in the Anthropocene

Interactome Analysis of Human Phospholipase D and Phosphatidic Acid-Associated Protein Network.

Mammalian phospholipase D (PLD) enzyme family consists of six members. Among them, PLD1/2/6 catalyzes phosphatidic acid (PA) production, while PLD3/4/5 has no catalytic activities. Deregulation of the PLD-PA lipid signaling has been associated with various human diseases including cancer. However, a comprehensive analysis of the regulators and effectors for this crucial lipid metabolic pathway has not been fully achieved. Using a proteomic approach, we defined the protein interaction network for the human PLD family of enzymes and PA and revealed diverse cellular signaling events involving them. Through it, we identified PJA2 as a novel E3 ubiquitin ligase for PLD1 involved in control of the PLD1-mediated mammalian target of rapamycin signaling. Additionally, we showed that PA interacted with and positively regulated sphingosine kinase 1. Taken together, our study not only generates a rich interactome resource for further characterizing the human PLD-PA lipid signaling but also connects this important metabolic pathway with numerous biological processes