Isabelle Daunais and Allan Hepburn, eds. Diplomacy and the Modern Novel: France, Britain, and the Mission of Literature. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020. Pp. 252. $65.00 (cloth).

Abstract

by two whale chapters-the North Atlantic right whale and the whale-and by many shipborne episodes of migration and transportation interspersed throughout the book. For instance, in the chapter "G is for Giraffe," we learn about the early nineteenth-century efforts to secure and transport these animals from Africa to London's menageries.Notably, exotic animals are hardly the only characters in the world of Animalia. Several of the alphabet letters are made of British animals, such as the dog, the fox, the horse, and the boar (which includes pigs), who became entangled with the affairs of empire. For instance, horses, just like elephants in India, were trained to serve as "instruments of warfare" (57), while foxes and pigs, introduced to new colonies as a sustainable source of food (pork) and for entertainment (fox hunting), became troublesome and destroyed ecosystems in many colonies. Talking of pests or other much-maligned creatures, Animalia brilliantly includes the mosquito, the scorpion, and the vulture, and the chapter on the mosquito, which discusses the role of colonialism and its modernizing projects in spreading malaria epidemics (122), is of particular relevance to today's global pandemic.