This book examines discriminations against horses in the literature and culture of the long eighteenth century alongside changing animal welfare and anticruelty activism. In doing so, it challenges period conceptions of what horses should look and behave like alongside systemic prejudice and normalized violence towards those who did not conform. It likewise follows literary discourses that sought to improve the lives and perceptions of horses with disabilities or those considered unideal in some way during a period of exploitative early capitalism.

Explores animal welfare, cruelty, and ideas of disability in the long eighteenth century through the figure of the horse Posits that horses were living agents within an anthropocentric and exploitative system Examines period anxieties over bodily aesthetic, ideal behaviour, animal agency, and human-animal hierarchies

Autorentext

Monica Mattfeld is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Northern British Columbia, Canada. She specializes in animal studies, disability studies, and the literature and history of eighteenth-century Britain. She has published on the interplay between animal and human disability, early modern horsemanship practices, theatrical animals, the early circus, and performances of gender. Mattfeld is the author of multiple animal-studies publications, including Becoming Centaur: Eighteenth-Century Masculinity and English Horsemanship.

Inhalt

Chapter 1. Introduction.- Chapter 2. Approaches: Methods, Ethics, and Theories.- Chapter 3. Love, Pain, and Fear.- Chapter 4. The Perfectly Ideal and Perfectibility.- Chapter 5. Jades and Jadeism.- Chapter 6. Blood and the Natural History of the Horse.- Chapter 7. The Great Chain of Being, Cruelty, and Questions of Perfection.- Chapter 8. Economies of Death.- Chapter 9. 'Old' Horses.- Chapter 10. Epilogue.- Bibliography.- Index.