Reckoning with the Beast

Animals, Pain, and Humanity in the Victorian Mind
Erscheinungsjahr 2000
ISBN: 978-0-8018-6677-7
Verlag: Johns Hopkins University Press

Buch, Englisch, Band 98, 204 Seiten, Paperback, Format (B × H): 152 mm x 229 mm, Gewicht: 346 g

Reihe: The Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science

Historian James Turner focuses on the great rise of Victorian concern for the humane treatment of animals, one of the most noteworthy flowering of such sentiment in modern times and one that engaged the support of the rich and the powerful, of church dignitaries, peers and ministers, and the queen herself. In delving into the history of animal rights, he also offers a fresh perspective on such varied aspects of Victorian culture as attitudes toward sex, pain, child labor, women, poverty, and science.

Turner draws on extensive researh in the archives of a animal protection societies, literature of the period, and controversial writings on the treatment of animals. He argues that the dual shocks of industrialization and urbanization helped produce a deeper emotional identification with the natural world. Scientists of the day, proclaiming that human beings were close kin to beasts, not only encouraged but demanded considerate treatment for animals, a sentiment that reached its liveliest expression in the antivivisection controversy. By the turn of the century, the author demonstrates, new conceptions of human nature adn heightened sensitivity even to the plight of lower life-forms were contributing to a new understanding of man's place in nature.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Turner, James

Turner, James C.

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Geschichte einzelner Länder Amerikanische Geschichte

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Preface
I. Introduction
II. Cruelty in a Factory Age
III. ". This Humane and Civilizing Charity"
IV. Man Becomes an Animal
V. "Revolting to the Cultivated Mind. "
VI. Science and Sensibility
VII. Entangled in the Web of Life
Epilogue
Notes
Bibliographic Note
Acknowledgments
Index

Über Autor(innen)

Turner, James C.
James Turner is the Cavanaugh Professor of Humanities at the University of Notre Dame and the director of the Erasmus Institute. His books include Without God, Without Creed and Reckoning with the Beast also available from Johns Hopkins.

James Turner is a professor of history at the University of Notre Dame. His books include Without God, Without Creed, and The Liberal Education of Charles Eliot Norton, both available from Johns Hopkins.