Humans and Other Animals in Eighteenth-Century British Culture: Representation, Hybridity, Ethics

Humans and Other Animals in Eighteenth-Century British Culture: Representation, Hybridity, Ethics, ed. Frank Palmeri. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006. Pp. xi + 217. $94.95.

The eleven essays here on the representation of animals in the eighteenth century employ interpretive models that range from antiquity (Pythagoras, Ovid) to contemporary (Bruno Latour, Peter Singer, Donna Haraway). While the title may initially suggest a narrow focus, one quickly realizes that eighteenthcentury works with animal references or images must far outnumber those lacking such representations, so the volume really finds its focus in its subtitle, asking questions about the meaning and ethical implications of representations that mix humans and animals.

In the opening essay, "Gross Metempsychosis and Eastern Soul," Chi-ming Yang locates the notion of hybridity in reassessments of the Great Chain of Being. Pointing to Europe's complex attempts to assimilate the news of ancient and highly advanced Eastern civilizations, Ms. Yang discusses the ways the Cambridge Platonists and others considered (sometimes embracing or dismissing, always refiguring) Eastern notions of the transmigration of souls in laying the ground work for new scientific notions of a nature in which bodies, human, animal, and vegetable, exist in a perpetual system of circulation.

In "The Lady and the Lapdog: Mixed Ethnicity in Constantinople, Fashionable Pets in Britain," Theresa Braunschneider argues that Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's analogy comparing dog breeding and human "mixing" informs links between fashion (lap dogs and ornamental...