Table Of ContentAnimality in British Romanticism
Routledge Studies in Romanticism
1 Keats’s Boyish Imagination 9 Thomas De Quincey
Richard Marggraf Turley New Theoretical and Critical
Directions
2 Leigh Hunt Edited by Robert Morrison and
Life, Poetics, Politics Daniel S. Roberts
Edited by Nicholas Roe
10 Romanticism and Visuality
3 Leigh Hunt and the London Fragments, History, Spectacle
Literary Scene Sophie Thomas
A Reception History of his Major
Works, 1805–1828 11 Romanticism, History,
Michael Eberle-Sinatra Historicism
Essays on an Orthodoxy
4 Tracing Women’s Romanticism Edited by Damian Walford Davies
Gender, History and
Transcendence 12 The Meaning of “Life” in
Kari E. Lokke Romantic Poetry and Poetics
Edited by Ross Wilson
5 Metaphysical Hazlitt
Bicentenary Essays 13 German Romanticism and
Uttara Natarajan, Tom Paulin and Science
Duncan Wu The Procreative Poetics of Goethe,
Novalis, and Ritter
6 Romantic Genius and the Jocelyn Holland
Literary Magazine
Biography, Celebrity, Politics 14 Colonialism, Race, and the
David Higgins French Romantic Imagination
Pratima Prasad
7 Romantic Representations of
British India 15 Keats and Philosophy
Edited by Michael J. Franklin The Life of Sensations
Shahidha K. Bari
8 Sympathy and the State in the
Romantic Era 16 Animality in British
Systems, State Finance, and the Romanticism
Shadows of Futurity The Aesthetics of Species
Robert Mitchell Peter Heymans
Animality in British
Romanticism
The Aesthetics of Species
Peter Heymans
NEW YORK LONDON
First published 2012
by Routledge
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Simultaneously published in the UK
by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group,
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© 2012 Taylor & Francis
The right of Peter Heymans to be identified as author of this work has
been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
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without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record has been requested for this book.
ISBN: 978-0-415-50730-1 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-203-11486-5 (ebk)
Typeset in Sabon
by IBT Global.
Printed and bound in the United States of America on sustainably sourced
paper by IBT Global.
For Jonathan, Stijn and my parents
Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction: The Aesthetics of Species 1
PART I
1 The Environmental Ethics of Alienation:
The Ecological Sublime 19
2 Green Masochism:
Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” 41
3 Hunting for Pleasure: Wordsworth’s Ecofeminism 61
PART II
4 Humans and Other Moving Things:
Wordsworth Visits London (with Deleuze and Guattari) 83
5 The Cute and the Cruel:
Taste, Animality and Sexual Violence in Burke and Blake 101
6 A Problem of Waste Management:
Frankenstein and the Visual Order of Things 118
PART III
7 Revelation, Reason, Ridicule: The Scientifi c Sublime 137
viii Contents
8 A Taste of God:
Natural Theology and the Aesthetics of Intelligent Design 154
9 Beauty with a Past: Evolutionary Aesthetics
in Erasmus Darwin’s The Temple of Nature 169
Notes 185
Bibliography 205
Index 216
Acknowledgments
This book has its roots in the doctoral dissertation which I wrote at the Vrije
Universiteit Brussel between 2006 and 2010. I owe a tremendous intellec-
tual debt to the two supervisors of that project, Oskar Wellens and Johan
Callens, whose ideas have shaped my thinking in crucial ways. Thanks
also go to my brother Stijn, who triggered my interest in animal ethics
and academic research. On a more logistical level, I am greatly indebted to
the Research Foundation—Flanders for its generous grant and to my par-
ents for their unfl agging care and interest, especially during the year that I
wrote this book. It is diffi cult to overstate Jonathan’s contribution. Without
his meticulous proofreading, incisive comments and ongoing support, this
book would have been much less readable (or more unreadable). At the Vrije
Universiteit Brussel, I would like to thank Liesbeth Bekers and Ann Peeters
for their down-to-earth advice on everything academic. Thanks also to the
members of my dissertation committee—in particular to Franca Bellarsi,
Noel Jackson and Jürgen Pieters—whose encouraging reviews inspired me
to upgrade my dissertation into this book. I am also extremely grateful to
Greg Garrard, Janelle Schwartz and Philip Shaw for reviewing my book
proposal for Routledge and for their thoughtful comments.
Two chapters in this book originally appeared elsewhere, albeit in very
diff erent forms. Chapter 2 is a major update of the article “Reading the Ani-
mal: An Ecocritical Approach to the Discourse of the Sublime in Coleridge’s
‘Ancient Mariner,’” which was published in The Coleridge Bulletin 30,
no. 2 (2007). And Chapter 5 expands my article “Eating Girls: Becoming-
Animal and the Romantic Sublime in William Blake’s Lyca Poems,” which
appeared in Humanimalia: A Journal of Human/Animal Interface Studies
3, no. 1 (2011). I am very grateful to Graham Davidson, Sherryl Vint and
Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr. for their comments and for granting me permis-
sion to recycle this material here. Final credit goes to Jonathan, my par-
ents, Stijn, Melanie, Ann, Rebekka, Emma and my friends at the University
(Bieke, Julie, Liesbeth, Marie-Eve, Sabah and Simon) for creating an envi-
ronment that is incredibly loving, supportive and inspiring.
Introduction
The Aesthetics of Species
When Frankenstein’s Monster fi nally opens its “dull yellow eye,” its creator
instantly falls into a fi t of histrionic madness.1 What leaves him so over-
whelmed is not a feeling of fatherly pride or medical accomplishment, but a
visceral disgust at the creature’s ugliness—skin too transparent to conceal
its underlying arteries and muscles, a pair of glistening teeth set in stark
contrast against its black lips, eyes that look watery and jaundiced. Fran-
kenstein never recovers from this aesthetic shock. Too disappointed and
disturbed by the cosmetic failure of his project, he neglects to appreciate its
scientifi c success and realise that the creature’s disfi gured face actually dis-
guises the humane mind of a noble savage. What Mary Shelley’s novel thus
forcefully demonstrates is the extent to which the classifi cation of species is
an aesthetic activity, a simple matter of specere (the Latin verb from which
the term species derives, meaning “to look at”).
It is this importance of the aesthetic that I investigate in this book. Focus-
sing on the beautiful, ugly and sublime, I argue that the Romantics’ aesthetic
perception of animality both infl uenced and was infl uenced by their ethi-
cal, scientifi c and religious understanding of species. Several studies within
the fi elds of ecocriticism and animal studies have recently called attention
to the integral part that the animal played in British Romantic thought.
All canonical Romantic poets, Christine Kenyon-Jones and David Perkins
have shown, emphasised the need to treat animal life with more respect.2
They composed elegies for deceased pets (such as Byron’s epitaph for his
dog Boatswain), lamented the exploitation of work animals (Coleridge’s
“To a Young Ass”), urged readers to consider even the rights of insects
(Blake’s “The Fly”), criticised the sadistic pleasures of hunting (Words-
worth’s “Hart-Leap Well”) and published pamphlets promoting vegetari-
anism (Percy Shelley’s “A Vindication of Natural Diet”). One reason for
the Romantics’ commitment to animal welfare was the growing scientifi c
insight into the anatomical and psychological continuity between human
and non-human animals. In his 1790 study The Philosophy of Natural His-
tory, the Scottish naturalist William Smellie recognised that “man, in his
lowest condition, is evidently linked both in the form of his body and the
capacity of his mind, to the large and small orang-outangs,” an idea that,
