“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris
2 comments:
The Difference Engine?
Awesome. Any chance you'll be posting a syllabus at some point? I'm ABD in English at Rutgers just starting a diss. on something that falls under this heading--the place of the animal in Victorian realist representations of the social totality, esp. animal "characters" as problematic figures on the border between utilitarian, animal-studies-like approaches to ethics and proto-ecological/anti-humanist approaches (obviously informed by your work, Cary Wolfe's, and others'). It would be fantastic to see what texts you're using to think through the question of the nonhuman in a Victorian context.
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