Introduction: Human–Animal Studies and the Eighteenth Century

Abstract

The Introduction to the Special Issue of The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation titled "Animal, All Too Animal" appears at a time when debates about human reason, language, and consciousness central to postructuralist theories of the nineties are beginning to be supplemented by—and even confronted with—a recognition that humans always existed among nonhuman creatures. As this introduction describes, "Animal, All Too Animal" explores the Englightenment's rearticulation of enw and more intimate relationships with nonhumans; this history is not only populated by men of reason and women of feeling, but by the birds, dogs, apes, and horses with whom humans of different genders, ethnicities, and classes enjoyed—or suffered—increasing intimacies, and distances.

Boundary Transgressions: the Human-Animal Chimera in Science Fiction

“…Statistics reveal that only 5% of DNA separates all known genomes, the uniquely human part of which is limited to 0.1% (McHugh 2006, 67). Concerns about hybridity and an anxiety of race and species reveal a preoccupation with issues of origin and hierarchy and purity of species (Squier 1998) despite the fact that animals have increasingly been reconstituted through increasingly exotic genetic crossbreeding and the industrial production of meat (Cole 2011). For Cary Wolfe, the animal is a social construction that when examined reveals the shifting nature of the categories of "animal" and "human" (Wolfe 2009;Shapiro and DeMello 2010).…”

Introduction: Centring Animals Within Medical History

“…19 However, they also emphasize the complexity and historical specificity of those relationships, 14 McNeill (2000), Nash (2005), Cronon (1990). 15 Lorimer (2009), Cole (2011. 16 Philo and Wilbert (2000) p. 2.…”