Eighteenth-Century Studies

Steintrager, James A., 1965-
Humanity Gone Wild
Eighteenth-Century Studies - Volume 38, Number 4, Summer 2005, pp. 681-686

The Johns Hopkins University Press

James A. Steintrager - Humanity Gone Wild - Eighteenth-Century Studies 38:4 Eighteenth-Century Studies 38.4 (2005) 681-686 Humanity Gone Wild James A. Steintrager University of California, Irvine Erica Fudge, Ruth Gilbert, and Susan Wiseman, eds. At the Borders of the Human: Beasts, Bodies and Natural Philosophy in the Early Modern Period (Houndsmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire and New York: Palgrave, 2002) Pp. 269. Paperback $30.95. Richard Nash. Wild Enlightenment: The Borders of Human Identity in the Eighteenth Century (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2003) Pp. 216. $39.50. Michael Newton. Savage Girls and Wild Boys: A History of Feral Children (London: Faber and Faber Limited, 2002) Pp. 284. $14.00. Felicity A. Nussbaum. The Limits of the Human: Fictions of Anomaly, Race, and Gender in the Long Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) Pp. 336. $29.99. How have the boundaries of humanity historically been constituted? This is the question that drives all four of these studies. The general answer they give is that this occurs through negation: those who are not, for whatever reason, granted fully human status define what it is to be truly human. To Locke's constant reference to "idiots, children, and savages" as counterexamples in his aptly titled An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, these works add that amalgam of all three, the wild child, along with the physically disabled, women, apes, and a...