The Rise of Animals and Descent of Man, 1660–1800: Toward Posthumanism in British Literature between Descartes and Darwin by John Morillo (review)

Readers of academic monographs on animal studies, including those focused on a particular literary period, enter waters so replete with historical treatises and literary works that the sheer number and variety of evidential texts brought forward can present challenges not easily resolved by reader or writer. We rely heavily on the focus of chapters as one guiding oar into those waters, and the index as the other; both are crucial in determining whether or not a particular study will be useful in one's own research projects related to animal studies. In The Rise of Animals and Descent of Man, one must navigate somewhat differently because each chapter is unusually extensive in its scope, and, conversely, the index is not as thorough as one would like; it does not list more than six animal species, for example. Even so, John Morillo's study is so comprehensively researched and the analysis so fluid that the expansiveness of its ambition—a theoretical analysis spanning the entire long eighteenth century—does not seem unwieldy. In fact, each chapter answered questions on particular topics that I had not entirely realized were unanswered until then.

One of the assumptions in reading a book on animal studies in relation to literature is that the author's sensibilities towards animals determine not only the subject matter but also the trajectory of the argument, the design of the chapters, and the theories employed to persuade readers of the relevance of the study. Such an assumption is not unreasonable; if readers detected otherwise, we might abandon the book midway. Morillo's title effectively applies posthumanism as a step further than being an advocate for animals or animal studies; he deepens the challenge by asking readers to reduce the focus on human-animal relations and instead follow unwaveringly the "curious turns" of the ideology within the cited texts, as he puts it, thereby significantly enlarging the perspective of the subject beyond that often found in other such studies. As he writes in the introduction, "I am thus most interested in feeling out when the response of eighteenth-century authors to animals sharing the world with them grew, as it were, feverish. When and where does giving compassion clash with taking back human distinction? Given that workable alternatives to Cartesianism need to develop ways to restore feelings, thought, language, and a soul to animals, how did the British attempt to do that, and how did that work with or against sensibility and its focus on the kind of sympathy that may best arise while we are unaware?" (xv–xvi). I do not know that another animal study poses the same questions or pursues the answers with the same result.

An important element in Morillo's monograph is that most other ecocritical studies of the long eighteenth century have either a particular focus, such as Ingrid H. Tague, Animal Companions: Pets and Social Change in Eighteenth-Century Britain (2015), or are a collection of essays with a decentralized theory, such as Katherine M. Quinsey, ed., Animals and Humans: Sensibility and Representation, 1650–1820 (2017), though both of these are sound scholarly resources. Even so, Morillo's study of the long eighteenth century is a foundational contribution; it stabilizes animal studies of this period in a practical theoretical stance, from which more specific topics can emerge. The arc of his argument—between Descartes and Darwin—is fully developed through Erasmus Darwin (less so of Charles) and notably serves to establish each chapter's topics against the seventeenth-century Cartesian influence in order to move into the Darwins' impact on science and literature. This is helpful in such a broad study and allows for gathering texts and treatises otherwise not (or not often) included in books on this subject.

Morillo acknowledges and, to some extent, situates similar monographs dealing...