Humans and Other Animals in Eighteenth-Century British Culture: Representation, Hybridity, Ethics, ed. by Frank Palmeri (review)

165 way that apostrophes to victims and perpetrators of colonization brought home the effects of global trade to Europeans. The challenges of studying the politics of form are considerable: it yokes the abstract and the historical, the temporally and spatially ambiguous, and the familiar and foreign. For instance, while Ms. Festa understandably eschews a conventional class analysis, she does not replace class with an alternative concept to make larger sense of the psychic and cultural processes she so ably elaborates . The effect is to atomize already abstract European subjects into unidentifiable provenance and alliance, oddly reifying them in their individual textual dynamics or within the category of the person. Despite this shortcoming, her acute examination of the sentimental form provides the capstone rather than the last nail in the coffin of sensibility studies. Roxann Wheeler Ohio State University Humans and Other Animals in Eighteenth -Century British Culture: Representation , Hybridity, Ethics, ed. Frank Palmeri. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006. Pp. xi ⫹ 217. $94.95. The eleven essays here on the representation of animals in the eighteenth century employ interpretive models that range from antiquity (Pythagoras, Ovid) to contemporary (Bruno Latour, Peter Singer, Donna Haraway). While the title may initially suggest a narrow focus, one quickly realizes that eighteenthcentury works with animal references or images must far outnumber those lacking such representations, so the volume really finds its focus in its subtitle, asking questions about the meaning and ethical implications of representations that mix humans and animals. In the opening essay, ‘‘Gross Metempsychosis and Eastern Soul,’’ Chi-ming Yang locates the notion of hybridity in reassessments of the Great Chain of Being . Pointing to Europe’s complex attempts to assimilate the news of ancient and highly advanced Eastern civilizations , Ms. Yang discusses the ways the Cambridge Platonists and others considered (sometimes embracing or dismissing , always refiguring) Eastern notions of the transmigration of souls in laying the ground work for new scientific notions of a nature in which bodies, human , animal, and vegetable, exist in a perpetual system of circulation. In ‘‘The Lady and the Lapdog: Mixed Ethnicity in Constantinople, Fashionable Pets in Britain,’’ Theresa Braunschneider argues that Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s analogy comparing dog breeding and human ‘‘mixing’’ informs links between fashion (lap dogs and ornamental slaves) and new scientific ideas of race—ideas that provided taxonomies for distinguishing human animals as more and less human, and so more and less suited for various functions in society. Gulliver’s Travels is a touchstone for many of the discussion of human/animal hybridity, and two essays focus on the fourth voyage. Christina Malcolmson ’s ‘‘Gulliver’s Travels and Studies of Skin Color in the Royal Society’’ insightfully locates Swift’s representations of skin color in relation to Robert Boyle’s directions for new scientific travelers, and the broader Royal Society ’s interests in color. Her claims, however , about what Swift is doing with this material would be richer if she had con- 166 sidered that before, during, and after the Travels, Swift is fully engaged in Ireland as a self-appointed spokesman for the savages’ side of an imperial debate on race. In ‘‘Gulliver the Houyahoo: Swift, Locke, and the Ethics of Excessive Individualism,’’ Allen Michie returns to the much trod path of Swift and Locke, reading Swift’s tripartite figuring of elements of humanity in Part IV as an exercise in hybridity that complicates Locke’s sorting of the nominal and essential . For Mr. Michie, Swift reopens free will and individual choice, ethical and moral aspects of humanity that Locke treats as essential. In ‘‘The Autocritique of Fables,’’ Frank Palmeri complicates the notion that all animal fables are simply anthropomorphic projections, identifying a category of fable he terms autocritical, in which an animal is given human powers of observation and expression to speak for itself rather than as a stand-in for a human being. In most cases these autocritical fables are reflections on human hypocrisy and arrogance with respect to other creatures. While Mr. Palmeri does not use the prevalent term hybridity, his analysis of the development of fables is placed in the historical context of the rise of empiricism and the new scientific attitudes that would, by the 1740s, spell...