Rise of Animals and Descent of Man, 1660-1800

The Rise of Animals and the Descent of Manilluminates compelling historical connections between a current fascination with animal life and the promotion of the moral status of non-human animals as ethical subjects deserving our attention and respect,and a deep interest in the animal as agent in eighteenth-century literate culture. It explores how writers, includingwell-knownpoets, important authors who mixed art and science, and largely forgotten writers of sermons andchildren's stories all offered innovative alternatives to conventional narratives about the meaning of animals in early modernEurope. They question Descartes' claim that animals are essentially soulless machines incapable of thought or feelings. British writers from 1660-1800 remain informedby Cartesianism, but often counter it by recognizing that feelings are as important as reason when it comes to defining animal life and its relation to human life. This British line of thought deviates from Descartes by focusing on fine feeling as a register of moral life empowered by sensibility andsympathy, but this very stance is complicated by cultural fears that too much kindness to animals can entail too much kinship with them-fears made famous in the later reaction toDarwinian evolution. The Rise of Animals uncovers ideological tensions between sympathy for animals and a need to defend the special status of humansfrom the rapidly developing Darwinian perspective. The writers it examines engage in complex negotiations with sensibility and a wide range of philosophical and theological traditions. Their work anticipates posthumanist thought and the challenges it poses to traditional humanist values within the humanities and beyond. The Rise of Animalsis a sophisticated intellectual history of the origins of our changing attitudes about animals that at the same time illuminates major currents of eighteenth-century British literary culture.