Book contents
- Animal Illness and the Literary Imagination
- Animal Illness and the Literary Imagination
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Literature and the Early Biopolitics of Animal Disease
- Chapter 2 Beyond Biopolitics
- Chapter 3 Literary Counter-Histories of Foot-and-Mouth Disease in North America
- Chapter 4 The Early Literature of COVID-19
- Conclusions
- Works Cited
- Index
Chapter 1 - Literature and the Early Biopolitics of Animal Disease
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 November 2025
Book contents
- Animal Illness and the Literary Imagination
- Animal Illness and the Literary Imagination
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Literature and the Early Biopolitics of Animal Disease
- Chapter 2 Beyond Biopolitics
- Chapter 3 Literary Counter-Histories of Foot-and-Mouth Disease in North America
- Chapter 4 The Early Literature of COVID-19
- Conclusions
- Works Cited
- Index
Summary
This chapter explores the emergence of an animal biopolitics at the start of the eighteenth century, when English and Italian governments instituted a new method for controlling rinderpest outbreaks in Europe: the state-sponsored killing of infected animals. This stamping out method transferred powers traditionally invested in farmers and cattle traders to government officials, forcing those same officials to justify their actions in ways that redefined the relationships between citizen and state. This redefinition troubled literary figures from a variety of political orientations, raising fears that this new power over animal populations might be brought to bear upon the growing human populations in Europe. Such fears are vividly expressed in major and minor works of eighteenth-century literature, from the Houyhnhnms’ proposal to exterminate the Yahoos in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels to the curious manner by which the anxieties of agricultural laborers are juxtaposed with images of human slaughter in Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.”
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- Animal Illness and the Literary ImaginationA Cultural History of Animal Disease Management, pp. 20 - 76Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2025
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