Giant Squid in Transatlantic Culture

Otto Latva is a historian focusing on human-animal and human-plant studies as well as environmental history. He has studied widely the early modern as well as the nineteenth-century and twentieth-century societies and cultures. In his previous studies, Latva has especially investigated the shared history of humans and animals and the long-term understanding of the marine environment. He is currently working as a university lecturer in Cultural Heritage Studies at the University of Turku, Finland. He also leads a research project Disappeared, Endangered and Newly Arrived Species: The Human Relationship with the Changing Biodiversity of the Baltic Sea (HumBio), funded by the Academy of Finland.

• List of figuresAcknowledgmentsAbbreviationsIntroduction: Humans, Cephalopods, and History Part I: The Era of New Ideas and Far-Reaching Seafaring, 1763–18021. The Late Eighteenth-Century Encounters with Giant-Sized Squid2. Narratives and Enlightenment TheoriesPart II: The Years of Uncertainty and Discovery, 1802–613. The Early Nineteenth-Century Encounters with Giant-sized Squid4. The Enormous Squid, Zoology, and the Public DiscussionPart III: The Period of Cephalopod Monsters, 1861–995. The Late Nineteenth-Century Encounters with Giant-sized Squid6. The Enormous Squid in Scientific and Public Discussion in the 1860s7. The Emergence of the Giant Squid and how it Became a MonsterConclusionIndex

"This bold, original book is the history of a shared relationship between two intelligent, social species with entangled pasts – yet who are utterly alien to each other. It takes us on a deep, spectral journey, fathoming brand new territory in Human Animal Studies, environmental history, Transatlantic Studies, and Enlightenment historiography. We follow the squid into interdisciplinary depths, pursue subterranean archives, chart sea flows that connect an international transatlantic world. Fundamentally, we are shown that it was not the squid who was the monster but our own human imaginative hunger."Sandra Swart, Stellenbosch University, South Africa