This chapter discusses Darwin’s lifelong interest in unconscious agency and instinct. Darwin typically treats instinct as a rational action that has become habitual and thus heritable; instinct embodies a cognitive process that does not know itself as such. His discussion of instinct is thus connected to other moments in his work where he uses the term ‘unconscious’; his treatment of previous taxonomists of species as unconsciously providing evidence for species transmutation, and his discussion of unconscious selection as an analogy for the effect of aesthetic preference in sexual selection. Darwin’s unconscious anticipates Freud’s as the embodiment of human agency in biological history.

This chapter develops the topic of blood as a figure of species identity in readings of late Victorian anthropological writing on totemism and on blood brotherhood. The totem, according to its first theorist, is always a species, and totemism is a theory of species identity. Besides anthropology, the chapter discusses Kipling’s Jungle Book and Stoker’s Dracula. It closes with a return to Freud, to the species concept in psychoanalysis, and to species identity as constituted by diet.

This chapter follows a cue from Jacques Lacan in considering the antinomy of nonsense and onomatopoeia. With Edward Lear at its centre, the chapter discusses the violence against the animal and the species melancholy that characterize nonsense writing. Also treated are Christine Rossetti’s Sing-Song and animal poems by Thomas Hardy.

Michel Foucault argued that in the nineteenth century, the species became a population and became subject to political management. Foucault’s claim defines the political stakes of this book, whose point of departure is the loss of a theological ground for the species concept. As species become targets of political power, they become mutable and historically contingent. The book argues that a result is that species come to be identified with aesthetic categories and with symptomatic or unmotivated behaviors.

This chapter defines a genre of lyric whose speaker is a personification of an entire species. Lyrics of this kind appear in poetic field guides in the 1830s, and in poetry for children throughout the century. The chapter closes with readings of lyrics by Swinburne and Hardy in which the conditions under which a species can become a speaking subject are opened to critique

This chapter develops the concerns of Chapter 4 by discussing the relation between Freud’s concept of the symptom and Darwin’s reading of defunctioned and residual structures as evidence of species identity and affinity. Freud’s unconscious emerges in this analysis as emerging from the nineteenth century crisis of the species concept.

This chapter is the first of two on blood as a figure for kinship and species identity in the nineteenth century. It begins with the history of bloodletting and blood transfusion in the period, and documents the emergence in the second half of the century of an imaginary species body, whose individual members are characterized by their propensity to save or waste blood from the common supply. The idea of a collective body sharing a common blood is traced in a series of texts on bloodshed and blushing, including Alfred Tennyson’s “Maud,” William Morris’s “The Defense of Guinevere,” Christina Rossetti’s “The Convent Threshold,” D. G. Rossetti’s “Jenny,” and Darwin’s Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals.

This chapter discusses onomatopoeia as an ancient poetic device for representing bird and animal calls that in the 1830s was repurposed for science by inclusion in field guides as an aid to identifying bird species. The poetic tradition of representing animal utterances by onomatopoeia makes a contrast with another tradition in which animals are endowed with speech. The chapter considers the place of both traditions in British Romanticism and concludes by arguing that the incorporation of animal utterance into poetry is figured by Keats and others as transforming animals into food.