The poetics of conscience: Animal advocacy in British Romanticism (William Cowper, Mary Wollstonecraft, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Clare).

摘要

This dissertation responds to an increasing scholarly interest in the significance of animals. By employing a cultural studies approach to conceptions of the natural world, I seek to broaden the scope of recent critical studies on the environment, sympathy, and humanitarian politics. In this study, I assess sentimental and realist depictions of animals from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as they provided an important context for understanding otherness in the natural world and everyday life. Many Romantic writers popularized the notion that sympathy for animals was essential to the enhancement of humanity. By conflating animal and human experience, they sought to demonstrate a shared capacity for feeling or what I term “sentimental anthropomorphism.” Throughout the dissertation, I argue that sentimental anthropomorphism encouraged interactions between animal advocacy and humanitarian campaigns; at the same time, the Romantic period experienced gradual transitions towards literary realism with a recognition of animals as unique creatures apart from human significance, representing a deepening awareness of otherness in general. The writers who are the focus of this study—William Cowper, Mary Wollstonecraft, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and John Clare—use animal metaphors to promote humanitarian concerns and critique social inequities. Though their applications of animal metaphors are diverse, even contradictory, they reveal that sympathy for animals was a common ground for understanding human issues during the nineteenth century.