Joy and Pity: Reading Animal Bodies in Late Eighteenth-Century Culture

This essay revisits a set of texts on farriery to examine a change in the ways that humans read and understood animal bodies as what Tobias Menely has called "somatically legible subjects." The essay identifies this change with a cultural rethinking of reading practices generally, and how these practices at the end of the eighteenth century served to privilege particular constructions of the relations of reaction and response, exteriority and interiority, animal and human, history and ethics.