Memorializing Animals during the Romantic Period


Book Description

Early nineteenth-century British literature is overpopulated with images of dead and deadly animals, as Chase Pielak observes in his study of animal encounters in the works of Charles and Mary Lamb, John Clare, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, and William Wordsworth. These encounters, Pielak suggests, coincide with anxieties over living alongside both animals and cemeteries in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth-centuries. Pielak traces the linguistic, physical, and psychological interruptions occasioned by animal encounters from the heart of communal life, the table, to the countryside, and finally into and beyond the wild cemetery. He argues that Romantic period writers use language that ultimately betrays itself in beastly disruptions exposing anxiety over what it means to be human, what happens at death, the consequences of living together, and the significance of being remembered. Extending his discussion past an emphasis on animal rights to an examination of animals in their social context, Pielak shows that these animal representations are both inherently important and a foreshadowing of the ways we continue to need images of dead and deadly Romantic beasts.




Animals, Museum Culture and Children’s Literature in Nineteenth-Century Britain


Book Description

Animals, Museum Culture and Children’s Literature in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Curious Beasties explores the relationship between the zoological and palaeontological specimens brought back from around the world in the long nineteenth century—be they alive, stuffed or fossilised—and the development of children’s literature at this time. Children’s literature emerged as dizzying numbers of new species flooded into Britain with scientific expeditions, from giraffes and hippopotami to kangaroos, wombats, platypuses or sloths. As the book argues, late Georgian, Victorian and Edwardian children’s writers took part in the urge for mass education and presented the world and its curious creatures to children, often borrowing from their museum culture and its objects to map out that world. This original exploration illuminates how children’s literature dealt with the new ordering of the world, offering a unique viewpoint on the construction of science in the long nineteenth century.




Memorializing Animals during the Romantic Period


Book Description

In his study of the presence of animals in early nineteenth-century works by Charles and Mary Lamb, John Clare, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Lord Byron, Chase Pielak observes that images of dead and deadly animals coincided with questions about what constitutes human life and its boundaries. He argues that each author uses language that ultimately betrays itself to expose beastly disruptions that not only startle the authors themselves but serve as landmarks within Romantic literature.
















Orations and memorial addresses


Book Description




Brinton Memorial Meeting


Book Description




Remembering Africa


Book Description

This collection of essays is concerned less with the representation of Africa than with the memory of the continent.