Beasts of burden : biopolitics, labor, and animal life in British Romanticism / Ron Broglio.

Author
Broglio, Ron, 1966- [Browse]
Format
Book
Language
English
Published/​Created
  • Albany : State University of New York Press, [2017]
  • ©2017
Description
xiii, 163 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm.

Availability

Copies in the Library

Location Call Number Status Location Service Notes
Firestone Library - Stacks PR468.A56 B74 2017 Browse related items Request

    Details

    Subject(s)
    Series
    SUNY series, studies in the long nineteenth century [More in this series]
    Summary note
    Ron Broglio examines how lives - human and animal - were counted in rural England and Scotland during the Romantic period. During this time, Britain experienced unprecedented data collection from censuses, ordinance surveys, and measurements of resources, all used to quantify the life and productivity of the nation. It was the dawn of biopolitics - the age in which biological life and its abilities became regulated by the state. Borne primarily by workers and livestock, nowhere was this regulation felt more powerfully than in the fields, commons, and enclosures. Using literature, art, and cultural texts of the period, Broglio explores the apparatus of biopolitics during the age of Adam Smith and Thomas Malthus. He looks at how data collection turned everyday life into citizenship and nationalism and how labor class poets and artists recorded and resisted the burden of this new biopolitical life. The author reveals how the frictions of material life work over and against designs by the state to form a unified biopolitical Britain. At its most radical, this book changes what constitutes the central concerns of the Romantic period and which texts are valuable for understanding the formation of a nation, its agriculture, and its rural landscapes.
    Bibliographic references
    Includes bibliographical references (pages 133-160) and index.
    Contents
    • Animal life and rural labor : literary and material resistance in biopolitical Britain
    • Docile numbers and stubborn bodies : population and the problem of multitude
    • On vulnerability : studies from life that ought not to be copied
    • Wonder as resistance : sheep, fairies, and James Hogg the Ettrick Shepherd
    • Animal dwelling in natural history : Thomas Bewick, George Stubbs, and corporality
    • Man proposes, animality disposes : antihuman landseer with implications for biopolitical Britain
    • Afterword : romanticism in the dust of this planet.
    ISBN
    • 9781438465678 ((hardcover : alkaline paper))
    • 143846567X ((hardcover : alkaline paper))
    • 9781438465685 ((pbk. : : alk. paper))
    • 1438465688 ((pbk. : : alk. paper))
    LCCN
    2016031433
    OCLC
    961828674
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