Biopolitics and Animal Species in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Science

Principles of species taxonomy were contested ground throughout the nineteenth century, including those governing the classification of humans. Matthew Rowlinson shows that taxonomy was a literary and cultural project as much as a scientific one. His investigation explores animal species in Romantic writers including Gilbert White and Keats, taxonomies in Victorian lyrics and the nonsense botanies and alphabets of Edward Lear, and species, race, and other forms of aggregated life in Darwin's writing, showing how the latter views these as shaped by unconscious agency. Engaging with theoretical debates at the intersection of animal studies and psychoanalysis, and covering a wide range of science writing, poetry, and prose fiction, this study shows the political and psychic stakes of questions about species identity and management. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.

• Incorporates science writing, poetry, prose fiction, and children's literature within a broad ambit of genres, showing how they share rhetorical strategies in writing about animal species and breaking down silos in Romantic and Victorian studies
• Documents a major general crisis in the species-concept and shows how questions of species identity in the nineteenth century did not only concern scientists but were at issue in many different fields of cultural production
• Extends Foucault's theory of biopolitics to discuss non-human animal populations, building on important recent work in animal studies