Animals and other people in eighteenth-century literature

"Animals and Other People" examines how eighteenth-century writers turn to animals to rethink the mechanisms by which social and political community is shaped, and to consider who or what this community includes. More specifically, it considers why and how writers of poetry (James Thomson), narrative fiction (Daniel Defoe and Laurence Sterne), and children's literature (Anna Letitia Barbauld, Sarah Trimmer, and Mary Wollstonecraft) use literary devices and genres---personification, life narratives, and fable---that foreground the relationship between humans and other species. Prevailing accounts of the eighteenth century depict an age of liberal revolutions that refined the logic of contract and secured its sovereign subject. This study traces a counter-tradition of political and ethical thought around the uncertain status of humans, animals, and persons. In doing so, it charts an important prehistory to recent work by J. M. Coetzee, Stanley Cavell, Jacques Derrida, and Giorgio Agamben, who all call for a critical reconsideration of the human-animal relationship. "Animals and Other People" suggests that new readings of various moments in Enlightenment thought can help us both to develop and to evaluate the kind of non-anthropocentric ethics that many critiques of the Enlightenment seek.