The Animal Claim
The Animal Claim

Author: Tobias Menely

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2015-04-10

Total Pages: 276

ISBN-13: 022623942X

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This “passionately eloquent” study shows the influence of eighteenth-century poetry on political theory, philosophy, and early discourse on animal rights (Helen Deutsch, University of California, Los Angeles). During the eighteenth century, some of the most popular British poetry showed a responsiveness to animals that anticipated the later language of animal rights. Such poems were widely cited in later years by legislators advocating animal welfare laws. In The Animal Claim, Tobias Menely links this poetics of sensibility with Enlightenment political philosophy, the rise of the humanitarian public, and the fate of sentimentality, as well as longstanding theoretical questions about voice as a medium of communication. In the Restoration and eighteenth century, philosophers emphasized the role of sympathy in collective life and began regarding the passionate expression humans share with animals, rather than the spoken or written word, as the elemental medium of community. Menely shows how poetry came to represent this creaturely voice and, by virtue of this advocacy, facilitated the development of a viable discourse of animal rights in the emerging public sphere. Placing sensibility in dialogue with classical and early-modern antecedents as well as contemporary animal studies, The Animal Claim uncovers crucial connections between eighteenth-century poetry; theories of communication; and post-absolutist, rights-based politics.

Castlereagh
Castlereagh

Author: John Bew

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2012-09-01

Total Pages: 753

ISBN-13: 0199977240

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Hardly is a figure more maligned in British history than Robert Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh. One of the central figures of the Napoleonic Era and the man primarily responsible for fashioning Britain's strategy at the Congress of Vienna, Castlereagh was widely respected by the great powers of Europe and America, yet despised by his countrymen and those he sought to serve. A shrewd diplomat, he is credited with being one of the first great practitioners of Realpolitik and its cold-eyed and calculating view of the relations between nations. Over the course of his career, he crushed an Irish rebellion and abolished the Irish parliament, imprisoned his former friends, created the largest British army in history, and redrew the map of Europe. Today, Castlereagh is largely forgotten except as a tyrant who denied the freedoms won by the French and American revolutions. John Bew's fascinating biography restores the statesman to his place in history, offering a nuanced picture of a shy, often inarticulate figure whose mind captured the complexity of the European Enlightenment unlike any other. Bew tells a gripping story, beginning with the Year of the French, when Napoleon sent troops in support of a revolution in Ireland, and traces Castlereagh's evolution across the Napoleonic Wars, the diplomatic power struggles of 1814-15, and eventually the mental breakdown that ended his life. Skillfully balancing the dimensions of Castlereagh's intellectual life with his Irish heritage, Bew's definitive work brings Castleragh alive in all his complexity, variety, and depth.