Introduction

Emerging from a shared sense of the critical possibilities offered by the problem of the human/nonhuman distinction, this forum features essays by a number of nineteenth-century Americanists variously interested in the recent methodological turn toward literary-critical collaboration with the methods and objects of the natural sciences. Though the contributing authors take up a wide array of texts and methodologies, they are united by the ways in which their arguments reveal human beings' inevitable implicatedness in the objects they perceive and observe.