Biopolitics and Animal Species in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Science

Principles of species taxonomy were contested ground throughout the nineteenth century, including those governing the classification of humans. Matthew Rowlinson shows that taxonomy was a literary and cultural project as much as a scientific one. His investigation explores animal species in Romantic writers including Gilbert White and John Keats, taxonomies in Victorian lyrics and the nonsense botanies and alphabets of Edward Lear, and species, race, and other forms of aggregated life in Charles Darwin’s writing, showing how the latter views these as shaped by unconscious agency. Engaging with theoretical debates at the intersection of animal studies and psychoanalysis, and covering a wide range of science writing, poetry, and prose fiction, this study shows the political and psychic stakes of questions about species identity and management. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.

Matthew Rowlinson is Professor of English at the University of Western Ontario. He is the author of Real Money and Romanticism (Cambridge University Press, 2010) and Tennyson’s Fixations: Psychoanalysis and the Topics of the Early Poetry (1994). His edition of Tennyson’s In Memoriam was published in 2014.