Introduction: Human–Animal Studies and the Eighteenth Century

We do not regard animals as moral beings. But do you suppose the animals regard us as moral beings? - An animal which could speak said: 'Humanity is a prejudice of which we animals at least are free.'- Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudice of Morality1You turkey.- Alex the grey parrot, to a toy parrot2The title of this special issue inverts that of Nietzsche's most aggressively playnil book, Human, All Too Human, a series of aphorisms bound by a few interrelated themes: the history of morality, the function of the soul, the place of science and art, the nature of suffering, and the aspiration to joy. Like Human, All Too Human, this issue of Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation is both deeply imbricated in a humanist history of sensibility and concerned to provide historical and ethical perspective on it. It emerges at a time when debates about human reason, language, and consciousness central to poststructuralist theories of the nineties are beginning to be supplemented by - and even confronted with - a recognition that humans always existed among nonhuman creatures, whether conceived as particular species struggling with and against us in some cultural and evolutionary drama or, more philosophically, as a category against which "the human" is necessarily defined. "The animal, what a word!" writes Jacques Derrida. It is "an appellation that men have instituted, a name they have given themselves the right and the authority to give to the living other."3 Both dispositions, historical and philosophical, figure in the contributions by Donna Landry, Laura Brown, Richard Nash, and Jonathan Lamb, scholars working in the field that has come to be known as "Animal Studies" or, alternatively, "Human-Animal Studies." The different names of this emerging field, in one sense, are symptomatic of the ethical, political, and methodological tensions within it - and of its complexity and richness.The early modern literary era has been an especially fulsome one for scholars of animal studies, demonstrated by a steady stream of essay collections and monographs: Erica Fudge, Perceiving Animals: Human and Beasts in Early Modern English Culture; Fudge, Ruth Gilbert and Susan Wiseman, eds. At the Borders of the Human: Beasts, Bodies and Natural Philosophy in the Early Modern Period; Nigel Rothfels, Savages and Beasts: The Birth of the Modern Zoo; Nash, Wild Enlightenment: The Borders of Human Identity in the Eighteenth Century; Bruce Boehrer, Shakespeare Among the Animals: Nature and Society in the Drama of Early Modem England, and Parrot Culture: Our 2500-Year-Long Fascination with the World's Most Talkative Bird; David Perkins, Romanticism and Animal Rights; Karen Raber and Treva Tucker, eds., The Culture of the Horse: Status, Discipline, and Identity in the Early Modern World; Nathaniel Wolloch, Subjugated Animals: Animals and Anthropocentrism in Early Modern European Culture; Mark Blackwell, ed., The Secret Life of Things: Animals, Objects, and It-Narratives in Eighteenth-Century England; Landry, Noble Brutes: How Eastern Horses Transformed English Culture; and, most recently, Brown, Homeless Dogs and Melancholy Apes: Humans and Other Animals in the Modern Literary Imagination* In truth, however, as Gary Wolfe points out, literary scholars - indeed, the humanities - are slow in coming to animal studies, "struggling to catch up with a radical revaluation of the status of nonhuman animals that has taken place in society at large."5 The last two centuries have seen what Derrida calls an "unprecedented transformation" in humananimal arrangements, whereby traditional forms of relationship (hunting, fishing, pet-keeping, husbanding of farm animals) have "been turned upside down," largely by science and technology.6 Long an object of study in natural philosophy, and then in the zoological, ethological, biological, and genetic forms of knowledge to which Enlightenment science gave rise, real animals have been reconstituted in ways previously unimagined - transformed, for example, through increasingly exotic genetic crossbreeding and, of course, the industrial production of meat. …