Beasts of Burden

Ron Broglio is Associate Professor of English and Senior Scholar in the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability at Arizona State University. He is the author of Surface Encounters: Thinking with Animals and Art and Technologies of the Picturesque: British Art, Poetry, and Instruments, 1750–1830.

• IllustrationsAcknowledgments1. Animal Life and Rural Labor: Literary and Material Resistance in Biopolitical Britain2. Docile Numbers and Stubborn Bodies: Population and the Problem of Multitude3. On Vulnerability: Studies from Life That Ought Not to Be Copied4. Wonder as Resistance: Sheep, Fairies, and James Hogg the Ettrick Shepherd5. Animal Dwelling in Natural History: Thomas Bewick, George Stubbs, and Corporality6. Man Proposes, Animality Disposes: Antihuman Landseer with Implications for Biopolitical Britain7. Afterword: Romanticism in the Dust of This PlanetNotesBibliographyIndex

"Yet perhaps the most important contribution of Beasts of Burden is its unwavering insistence on identifying moments and modes of resistance across Romantic poetic and visual works. Broglio makes a sustained and passionate case for vitality, wonder, mystery, and defiance as constitutive aspects of life beyond humanist frames. In this way, Beasts of Burden opens up exciting new paths for Romanticist inquiries into posthuman and biopolitical life." — Isis"…Beasts of Burden illuminates the tensions between biopolitical projects (largely defined as the Foucauldian variety) and laboring bodies such as the slaughtered cow, the lost sheep, the trusty working dog, and homo juridicus, the subject of law. In looking at creatures 'in the landscape,' this author modernizes a field of inquiry previously worked by the likes of John Barrell, Ann Bermingham, and Raymond Williams … this volume makes such satisfying connections between concerns of the Romantic period and its literary output that it will be helpful for both the lit scholar needing to historicize poems as well as the historian trying to grasp the literature." — British Society for Literature and Science"…Broglio's writing, while demanding, is clear and accessible, and he balances theoretical discussions with illuminating close readings of literature and art. This is one of the book's greatest strengths: it is packed with ideas and information, and it reveals the benefits of applying a complicated theoretical field (biopolitics) to the study of British Romantic literature, art, and culture. Beasts of Burden is thus an important contribution to biopolitics, ecocriticism, and Romantics studies. It is a true tour de force of literary scholarship." — European Romantic Review"Ambitious and innovative, Beasts of Burden crackles with intelligence, warmth, and insight." — Review 19