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

Anthropocene Audio: The Animal Soundtrack of the Contemporary Novel

Establishing a preliminary dialogue between sound studies and animal studies, this article investigates the representation of animal sounds in the contemporary novel. Focusing particularly on Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, Julia Leigh’s The Hunter, and Tom McCarthy’s C, it highlights the way in which these novels register and celebrate endangered sounds on the one hand and hybrid, biotechnological sounds on the other, thereby unearthing an overlooked aspect of our cultural response to species extinction and the ongoing technological mediation of the nonhuman world